As amazing as these developments are, it is becoming a bit of a 'Ship of Theseus' dilemma - especially when we have much more powerful chips helping out the micro almost like a form of life-support. To what extent is this still viable compared to software emulation when it is doing the same thing on a hardware level to mimic the old.
@@clangerbasher The Co-Pro made the 6502 and the other chips just handle the screen and memory, all the maths and other heavy lifting was done by the 'parasite'. So, I'd go with 'front end'
I have FPGASID, Armsid, Swinsid Ultimate (not Nano) and now BackSid. They are all pretty darn good. I love the FPGASID the best (It's dual SID and it's the priciest) mostly due to it's Pseudo Stereo mode, where it can play Voices 1 & 2 on one speaker channel, and Voices 2 & 3 on the other. Makes old 1985 games sound just Amazing.
I like the ARMSID, because there are some noices or sounds, that it plays really clear, compared to both old and new SID. I actually feel that the ARMSID is better than the original in some way. Three notches down in the first settings and run it ad old SID. Then it sounds exactly like how I remember the 1980's. Personally I am not buying any original SID more. The ARMSID is that good if you ask me. Yes, the FPGA is just a tiny bit better, but if we look at the price as well, then there is no question that the ARMSID is the best.
The main thing I notice is that the ARMSID is tighter; it doesn't have as much analog dropoff for the bass hits, which could be good or bad depending on what you like. I like it.
Yes. The ARMSID sounded ever so slightly tighter - more responsive - to me. The envelope shaping was more defined and less wishy-washy. Better overall, I'd say.
@@AnnaVannieuwenhuyse much like how emulating various Yamaha FM chips always comes down to minutiae of crappy filter paths on the original paired hardware!
Yeah, it's very cyberpunk with how tech is so accessible that with a bit of learning and a head for maths you can jerry-rig something new that does what the old thing does but in a completely different manner
@@jessthebenjamin758 For early 6581, make that 2 years. At most :-( Think mine almost always had broken voice 2 but did not realize during warranty, but now at least one more voice is broken, but I think the remaining is also very low. Probably should buy an ArmSID, don't care if it is 100% accurate. On the other hand, last time I checked the computer did not start at all, need some testing whenever I have time.
Got ARMSID too. With the config PRG, I could tune the sliders so that it would be nearly identical to my 6581R3 4485. Very happy with it, and glad stuff like this exists. I would've wished you did look at the config program to see if you were able to get it to sound as close as possible to your 6581R4AR. You might've even liked it better sounding than your beloved AR ;)
Hey; just wanted to give a big thanks for actually taking the time to let each SID play [mostly] through. This is thoughtful, as some of us jam along just as much as you do and having 10%, while OK, is just not as SIDtastic.
Very much agreed. There's a pretty clear reason Adrian seems to choose the songs he does, and it's not just for limit pushing - yes, it's good to push the SID's limits to expose faults but at the end of the day, if it's not something you want to listen to, why bother? These are all tracks I would use to showcase why I am interested in retro tech like this.
M.U.L.E., Ghostbusters, Archon, and one other game which the title I forget pumps a multiplexed data into the SID making it sound like there are more than 3 voices being played. They would have been an an excellent test for the ARMSID and other SIDs.
That ARMSID sounds excellent, but this video hi-lights just how amazing the C64 was/is at generating music, whether during into screens or in-game..... I'm pretty sure when it was designed and first produced, no-one at Commodore could have dreamt of the creativity of music designers, and what they would achieve! I know when I was working in a small local shop in the UK in the very early 80s, and we started selling these C64s alongside of the new ZX Spectrums and Atari 400/800 computers, the Atari was already known for it's good music and sound effects, but it didn't take too long before the C64 towered above the Atari with it's sound capabilities.....and even graphical capabilities in the hands of a skilled team! These tunes played here though - love that 'Ode To C64' - are just amazing, and the Atari 400/800 could never have come close to reproducing that !!
The collection of music you play makes me proud to be Danish. We had so many great composers for the C64! Some are still active to this day... Also, the "x" in "Sxren Lund" is an "ø"...
To be honest, the way the ARMSID sounds. It's clean, sharp, and tight. Almost as if it should sound as it should have been when they programed the song. The original SID is Crunchy, muddy, and soft. If I had a 64 with a bad SID, I would be aiming for the ARMSID as a direct drop in. I'm impressed!
Ugh, my boss decided that the meeting room that he's using as his temporary office needed vacuuming right in the middle of watching this video. At least the parts on the ARMSID that I could hear properly sounded great.
Something you may not have considered... Who's to say after nearly 40 years if OEM SID chips sound exactly the same as they did when they were fresh from the factory? I do think the ArmSID sounds better for the most part.
We should all be grateful to those who continue to produce products for these old machines to keep then alive. These old systems are what I started out with and I have so many memories of my childhood blowing entire weekends through just glued to the monitor with my brothers. I especially love when parents expose their children to this old tech - it helps them experience what we did and see how far technology has come.
The late programmers of the SID chip did not adhere to the specifications but pushed the digital to analog converter and filter to the limits. It is very difficult to digitally replicate the analog SID chip. I think the ARMSID succeeded in doing this. If anything, the digital interference noises from the original SID are now missing.
@@Renville80 not C64 related, but in certain cars you can get interference on the AM/FM radio when you rev the engine. Probably because of the alternator.
I was very impressed by that last one especially! Since it’s all done through the filter. I wonder if it’s just that accurate, or if there’s some way to decipher the intended digital audio from the signals and decode it in a more efficient way? But then it wouldn’t necessarily sound distorted in the same way right? So I guess it must be the first one. Damn.
Actually for a C64 and given it's a mid 1980's, inexpensive home computer, it sounds VERY good. It was never meant to be a sound system and yet it's not bad at all. Thanks for the demo !!
Another torture test might be to try some of the voice synthesis effects from games like Beach Head II, Ghostbusters, etc. Those effects really seemed to push the SID, and always sounded a little different SID to SID.
21:07 - Yeah I had a C64 at the time of Turbo Outrun, and I had the game ( i think I've still got it on tape), and I was blown away, the music sounded amazing, i couldn't believe the C64 could do it. What you don't get when you hear this with 2021 ears, is that Turbo Outrun had long loading times. There was a long load from tape to get the to that screen where the digitized music played, then i think you picked your settings, then it loaded again to get into the main game. It was quite tedious if you were playing from cassette. Still the intro music made it worth it. I certainly remember this game (and it's been a long time).
I have an ARMSID too (and contrary to what is said in the video, it’s very inexpensive, at least in Europe: 28 EUR, taxes included). My first impression was not good. Since I couldn’t use my chip puller (the thing is higher than your average real IC), I removed it by hand and… broke three legs. I was finally able to fix it by putting it in a second stronger socket and pour some solder into the holes (took me hours, but that’s another story). So be aware that you have to be extremely delicate when you handle it. Maybe it’s a placebo effect (happens all the time with music), but its sound seems too “dry”, “clinical" compared to my real 6581’s. In all honesty, it does a better job than a 6581 (less noise, predictable results, ability to change the curves to your own liking), but something is lost because of that perfection. It’s a bit like the eternal debate of vinyl vs CD. The so-called added warmness of the vinyls is in fact due to it being analogue and less precise (also, the music I listen to was originaly created for that medium, just like the SID tunes were originaly created, well, for the SID). If it makes any sense, I’d say that the analog modeling is too perfect, that the dirtyness of the real analog thing is lost in the process. I hope that future firmware upgrades will make it even better. But, to be completely honest, it’s the irony that Adrian points at the end of the video that bugs me: I’m not comfortable with the idea of having a CPU that’s orders of magnitude more powerful than the complete C64 in my SID. The configuration programme is nice, easy to use, fast and all, but it lacks the most elementary thing: a built-in SID player, which means you have to configure it, reset the computer, load a tune, then go back to the configurator, flash another configuration, reset the computer and load the tune again to compare. It would be really nice to do it in real time, with an integrated SID player (the three SID tunes I use for my tests are Ghost’n’Goblins, Commando and, of course, the 2016 remake of Donkey Kong’s original score best known as Adrian’s Dance Party :)). Two things I didn’t test but would be of interest to me are to determine if the ARMSID, being an emulator, adds some lag (must be nanoseconds, so I’m not really equipped to test that). The second thing I’d like to test is how it compares to the ReSID emulator with filter emulation and full resampling, running on Vice (or other emulators that use it). Well, Adrian, if you ever make a follow-up to that video, feel free to use my ideas! ;)
I really like these old synthesizers and it's really interesting hearing different ones and how they progressed through the years. With video games remakes can be difficult to replicate when it comes to music because of how many different synthesizers were used and how they were mixed.
I had a ZX Spectrum in the 80s. But one of my friends had a C64 which I would play on whenever when I would visit him. While I loved my speccy I wished I had a C64 as well. It's cool to be reliving this stuff with your channel. Maybe one of these days I buy me an authentic C64 and retro mod it.
I do not own a commodore. I've never heard any of these pieces of music And my judgment is not clouded by nostalgia For me the one called ARMSID is clearly a better player. Now that may not reflect the authentic sound but if I didn't have a sid chip that worked I'd happily put this in my commodore if I had one.
In the meanwhile, there's a new development on this side of the water, named 'SIDKick", which is basedon ARM, too, but with much higher processing performance and more accuracy, as it can run resid 1.0 opposed to the ARMSID's resid 0.16 emulation. And btw: It also emulated paddle/mouse AND the sound expander (fmOPL) :)
Its great to have more hardware replacement options. Like many of these things, you know the host chip could run circles around the whole machine its been put into. Which is a bit "inelegant", if you're being persnickety.
Glad you liked this Adrian, I'm a fan too. Another benefit over the Swinsid is that ARMSid perfectly handles paddle/analogue input, which the Swinsid doesn't handle at all. I love paddle games. (Apologies if someone has already mentioned this in the comments, there are hundreds to read through.)
There's a gnarly distortion on the 6581 that just sounds great. I say that as someone who is not that familiar with the C64. In the future, these chips/the software needs some distortion emulation to really get the sound perfect. It probably still won't be as cool as that gritty distortion on the 6581, which I'm sure wasn't by design, but sure sounds cool.
The wave / noise sound on the "Real" Sid sounds way more analog like a untuned radio. I guess its really hard to emulate analog behaviour for white noise and filters. It sounds very good for under 30 euros.
Noise was never analogue, it's an LFSR; but it does get clocked at 1 MHz, which can be an issue, and there are parasitic behaviours in the DAC and filter which i don't know if they're truly researched that well.
The noise in the SID chip is generated by an LFSR though. It's far from "real" analog noise. Though, with all these SID replacement chips, I wonder if a better noise waveform would be cool, or maybe it would just be heresy, haha. Pretty sure few program rely on the exact properties of SID waveform 3 (as opposed to just using it as a random number source).
@@Mnnvint i was thinking about playing a (random part of a long) sample of the original noise instead of generating your own. I wonder if this would be possible and if that solution could sound nice.
Pretty great synthesizer... what an understatement... its freakin' awesome... there you have it ! :-) Thanks for sharing.. (I personally still prefer the original SID by a significant margin... but I liked both the Ode to C64 and the Turbo Outrun quite a lot on the ARMSID..)
Wow, i am more of a x86 computer nerd and did not do much on the C64, appart from some games and dabled some basic on someone elses. But this was freaking interesting. You just got to love how good that chip was from this time period. Cool video!
I had discovered the ARMSID a few years ago and deemed it the ONLY suitable replacement to the genuine SID. Years later my thoughts have not changed. It's like $40 shipped to the USA...so it's pretty cheap all things considered. The configuration tool really puts it over the top as you can really adjust it in ways you just can't do with the stock SID. And, the firmware is updatable right from the C64 using the tool. Really amazing stuff.
I thought the sound from the ArmSID was cleaner than that of the original SID. Like the difference between a cassette with Dolby B noise-reduction turned on, and one with it turned off. Less hiss, but slightly quieter highs -- just like what Dolby B seemed to do back in the day when you'd record on a tape with it turned on. I would absolutely have no qualms whatsoever about buying one of these chips instead of a real SID chip, were the one in my C64 to go bad. A brand new product with a warranty? Yes please! Much better than relying on a used one sold "as is" on eBay, even though I'm sure it'd be more expensive. I'd take it in a second. Thanks for showing us this!
@Adrian Thanks for the review. I'm using the ARMSIDs over 1 year and I feel the same way about it :-) Great small and cheap SID Chip that makes you forget the original SID ;-)
Hey Adrian, thanks for turning me into this. I finally got my Commodore 64 “working” over this weekend finally (rust). Voices 2 and 3 on the SID are dead. I just ordered one of these to replace it.
Kim Christensen's (Future Freak) Great Tune sounds different on almost every of the like 14 C64s I have so I guess it's a Great Tune (ba-dum tss) to adjust the ARMSID to your pleasing.
I thought the same thing. I'd guess the transistors in the original have a slower transition time, resulting in reduced high frequency noise, compared to the arm sid.
@@brookewestonctc speaking of which, if you haven’t seen the project to emulate incandescent indicator lamps in an IBM mainframe panel, by using fancy nanopixel LEDs (or whatever they’re called); then I think you might get a kick from checking it out. Started by some guys who were bothered by the indicators not looking right with regular warm white LED replacements, as you can really easily tell which ones they replaced and which are original from the outside, especially when blinking very quickly. The code ended up way more complicated than they expected to capture the intricacies of timing and that cherry red to peach to yellow colour gradient.
What I have taken notice on, os that there are a few sounds, that are more audiable/hearable on the ARMSID. At least that is how it sounds in my machines. Although I have had the first setting, dialed three notches down in the config menu. Default settings sound a bit off, and 4 notches down, it starts to go off again. I say three down is the sweetspot, as far as I remember how the 80's sounded like back in the days. I am really pleased by the ARMSID, and replace every SID with one, once they go bad. For the price, it has no competition.
Great review Adrian. The price doesn’t seem bad to me, €28 plus shipping from Europe. Better than gambling on an original that could die the day after you install it.
I would love to see an episode devoted to the Amiga tracker scene. I've listened to some amazing tracker songs back in the day. Some even with vocals, which is not necessarily easy to do. Wondering why somebody can't develop an ASIC version of the SID, which could be transistor accurate. But probably not monetarily worth it, but that would be the best way.
Hugely expensive to do, and no doubt a huge minimum order size, at least by retro C64 standards. Meaning each chip would be priced out of most people's budget. There is just no way anyone could make their money back on it, even if you could find someone willing to bankroll it.
@@another3997 I know. But doggone it, it would be nice. It would not be bad if you could get economy of scale, but that will never happen for such a niche market.
The 'BOOM BOOM!' in that "Legend" track reminds of a damn cool early demo I got from someone around 1987 that had an animated man pounding on a huge kettle-drum to make that sound while some strange space-opera played in the window beside him. Was very cool, I wish I remembered the name or could find it again today. There's a few early what would be called 'demos' now that just had awesome music playing over beautiful (for the day) images that I loved to play as a kid that I wish I could find again. I need to do a deep dive into Lemon or whatever the big C64 archive is these days.
Honestly, with the ARMSID, it sounds like there's some built-in waveform interpolation while the waveforms are being modulated. Sounds super clean - i almost prefer it over the 6581AR
Hey, Adrian, this is some good music. Maybe a video one day going into some depth on C-64 music. As time goes on it will become a question of how many 32 bit computers does it take to Run a C64 8 bit?
I love the 6581R4AR. It is by far my favorite of the 6581 revisions. In a dual-socket setup (typically the Reloaded MK2), I use a 6581R4AR and 8580R5. With that combination, I have almost the entirety of the High Voltage SID Collection covered... unless I'm specifically wanting to listen to 2SID files.
Already mentioned here int he comments, but it's amusing to think that the ARM chip is making itself known in what was a competitor computer from the time, given the original ARM CPU was the Acorn RISC Machine processor, which is now a worldwide legacy from a formerly little British computer company... :D
I had a C64 around 1987 and when I played outrun for the first time then I was indeed blown away of the samples. Fun fact, when you play outrun on the later C64 model the sample would not be played by the SID chip.
That's traditional for the C64 :D Even many of the disk drives technically had more powerful CPU's than the 64 itself back in the day (same chip, but clocked at higher frequency)
I've never even powered on a C64, or heard one of those scores, but listening to Ode to C64 almost made me feel like I I missed out on something! That said, it sounded much nicer on the ARMSID! Amazing difference...
I had C-64 C in 1989, but sadly didn't have the Turbo Outrun game. That digitized intro would've been very cool and impressive back then, sounded almost like it's from Amiga 500 :)
Hi would like to thank you for this wonderful review , your time spent on this is fantastic I've recently restored a c64 watched your video and bought a arm sid , as the c64 i have had a bad pla chip and the sid was running hot and the music was playing fast or advanced, haven't put it fully to the test as yet ! Looking forward to the arm sid to arrive Thank you x
The product is decent! Especially because it's configurable. I hope that the authors will make it further and go to a single big IC version if it's cheaper. I think on Kickstarter it can blow up :) Not talking about chip shortages (in some cases it's just speculations) I think that the mass production price can be around 15-20 euro. I would like to assemble a decent SID based analog synths (there are some projects as I remember) so it needs SIDs... And actually it's the strong part that these ARMSIDs are configurable so you can make little changes in every chip and they will sound a bit (or not a bit) different. This will make a synth sound real (not like a VST plugin).
First time I have heard legend intro. Gotta say the armSID was cleaner. But the noise channel was overpowering in that track. Not sure if configurable but I would definitely prefer a middle ground between the two chips.
Sounds really good. I did notice one thing though and I think it's because the ARMSID is so much clearer ... the attack on certain sounds came through very abrupt and jarring. It may be that the addition noise on original SIDs is just masking that.
the ARMSID is perfect for me. i heard almost no differences. If my SID chip breaks then this is the good alternative. So that the C64 works as long as possible.
Great to see the armsid and the chameleon again. Armsid is a nice replacement for the aging sids and nice to see the Chameleon again hope to see it in a future video the number of cores it can do is slowly growing…… also the chameleon has a sound implementation on it own…
We'll see. I know people are super sensitive to variances from the real chips. I can't always hear these things myself, but musicians are highly tuned to this.
Thanks for reviewing this SID replacement Adrian, it's inevitable that we all need to replace those chips sooner or later and its nice to see (and hear) drop-in replacements. Are you also going to review the BackSID from Evie? (from the creator of the BackBit cartridge). As always, I love to watch your channel and I hope to see many more videos from you (especially the followup with the Tandy computer you recently posted which was full of leaves and spider eggs).
I have no experience with C64s or their ilk. But that ARMSID chip gives very clean audio, no hint of "overload" or mushyness. Since those things are hard to get, it looks like a good replacement.
I am happy with the UltiSID, SwinSID and ArmSID. The best part is that the UltiSID and ArmSID have mouse support. Looking forward to trying the BackSID. Adrian, try the music in VICE to see how things sound.
I love these sids: Stefan Hartwig - Ultimate_Intro_Studio_tune_07 (aka the Loader Theme of Myth) Fredrik Segerfalk - Shadow of the Beast (the main overworld theme, it has that deep bass, the underground theme is really good too) Steve Rowlands - Creatures and Creatures 2 (any track, but I like the second game better)
These glitch clickings in the bass track of the Donkey Kong track (and lots of other tunes) are audible on many of the earlier 6581 SIDs, so the ARMSID emulates their flaws as well.
Can you please try it with kb's music for Smash Designs' Second Reality C64 version, that stuff bangs and sounds like it's kinda hard with the trickery on the SID
I am not commodore user, never owned one, but I have to say that ArmSid has cleaner better sound than original. But maybe because the sound is better it takes away a but that 8-bit noisy feeling.
Nice to see Acorn’s ARM technology helping out old Commodores.
Of course the first ARM was a second processor to the BBC Micro!
I also have an Armsid in my sx64 which had a 6581 with bad filters and I am very happy with the Armsid everything just sounds great!
@@melanierhianna Or was the BBC Micro (Proton) the front end to the ARM? :)
As amazing as these developments are, it is becoming a bit of a 'Ship of Theseus' dilemma - especially when we have much more powerful chips helping out the micro almost like a form of life-support. To what extent is this still viable compared to software emulation when it is doing the same thing on a hardware level to mimic the old.
@@clangerbasher The Co-Pro made the 6502 and the other chips just handle the screen and memory, all the maths and other heavy lifting was done by the 'parasite'. So, I'd go with 'front end'
I really like when you played "Ode to C64" on the ArmSID, the smile you had on your face was priceless, just screams the words "this SID is AWESOME"
I believe the phrase you are looking for is "It freakin' works!"
I have FPGASID, Armsid, Swinsid Ultimate (not Nano) and now BackSid. They are all pretty darn good. I love the FPGASID the best (It's dual SID and it's the priciest) mostly due to it's Pseudo Stereo mode, where it can play Voices 1 & 2 on one speaker channel, and Voices 2 & 3 on the other. Makes old 1985 games sound just Amazing.
I like the ARMSID, because there are some noices or sounds, that it plays really clear, compared to both old and new SID. I actually feel that the ARMSID is better than the original in some way. Three notches down in the first settings and run it ad old SID. Then it sounds exactly like how I remember the 1980's. Personally I am not buying any original SID more. The ARMSID is that good if you ask me. Yes, the FPGA is just a tiny bit better, but if we look at the price as well, then there is no question that the ARMSID is the best.
@@shadowtheimpure For the average user, then it must be ARMSID. For the power user or the elite user, then it is the FPGA-SID.
Seems you have a good set of these how does the backsid compare?
@@brostenen Heard of the SIDkick, yet? Guess your collection will need this xD
@@brostenen Do they both support paddle/mouse controllers like the original SID? Most replacements don’t but SwinSID Ultimate does.
The main thing I notice is that the ARMSID is tighter; it doesn't have as much analog dropoff for the bass hits, which could be good or bad depending on what you like. I like it.
Yes. The ARMSID sounded ever so slightly tighter - more responsive - to me. The envelope shaping was more defined and less wishy-washy. Better overall, I'd say.
@@Lagrange_Point_6 It's not unexpected. The ARMSID is technically capable of perfection; though that's not really what most people want.
@@AnnaVannieuwenhuyse much like how emulating various Yamaha FM chips always comes down to minutiae of crappy filter paths on the original paired hardware!
The 8580 sounds tighter than the 6581 aswell.
Always love seeing these clever alternatives to aging parts and hardware running out of replacement parts.
Yeah, it's very cyberpunk with how tech is so accessible that with a bit of learning and a head for maths you can jerry-rig something new that does what the old thing does but in a completely different manner
"it's not even warm to the touch" I guess it's not perfect emulation then :-D
Bodges adding heating resistors must be on the way :-)
To truly make it perfect, it has to have a built in timer, and after 30 years, the chip just dies
@@jessthebenjamin758 "The Bicentennial Man"
@@jessthebenjamin758 For early 6581, make that 2 years. At most :-( Think mine almost always had broken voice 2 but did not realize during warranty, but now at least one more voice is broken, but I think the remaining is also very low. Probably should buy an ArmSID, don't care if it is 100% accurate. On the other hand, last time I checked the computer did not start at all, need some testing whenever I have time.
Got ARMSID too. With the config PRG, I could tune the sliders so that it would be nearly identical to my 6581R3 4485. Very happy with it, and glad stuff like this exists.
I would've wished you did look at the config program to see if you were able to get it to sound as close as possible to your 6581R4AR. You might've even liked it better sounding than your beloved AR ;)
I got the top slider (first slider) three notches down and run the ARMSID as old SID. That is how I remember the 1980's.
Maybe looking at the config would be a good second channel video
Could you please share where you put the sliders, would highly appreciate.
The vintage computers are becoming the ship of Theseus.
Yes, it is the same computer If you copy the internal program of the chip into another chip then you are tranferring the "soul" of the machine.
Hey; just wanted to give a big thanks for actually taking the time to let each SID play [mostly] through. This is thoughtful, as some of us jam along just as much as you do and having 10%, while OK, is just not as SIDtastic.
Very much agreed. There's a pretty clear reason Adrian seems to choose the songs he does, and it's not just for limit pushing - yes, it's good to push the SID's limits to expose faults but at the end of the day, if it's not something you want to listen to, why bother? These are all tracks I would use to showcase why I am interested in retro tech like this.
M.U.L.E., Ghostbusters, Archon, and one other game which the title I forget pumps a multiplexed data into the SID making it sound like there are more than 3 voices being played. They would have been an an excellent test for the ARMSID and other SIDs.
That ARMSID sounds excellent, but this video hi-lights just how amazing the C64 was/is at generating music, whether during into screens or in-game.....
I'm pretty sure when it was designed and first produced, no-one at Commodore could have dreamt of the creativity of music designers, and what they would achieve!
I know when I was working in a small local shop in the UK in the very early 80s, and we started selling these C64s alongside of the new ZX Spectrums and Atari 400/800 computers, the Atari was already known for it's good music and sound effects, but it didn't take too long before the C64 towered above the Atari with it's sound capabilities.....and even graphical capabilities in the hands of a skilled team!
These tunes played here though - love that 'Ode To C64' - are just amazing, and the Atari 400/800 could never have come close to reproducing that !!
SID: "See what they must do to mimic a fraction of my power!!"
The collection of music you play makes me proud to be Danish. We had so many great composers for the C64! Some are still active to this day...
Also, the "x" in "Sxren Lund" is an "ø"...
A mxxse once bit my sister.
To be honest, the way the ARMSID sounds. It's clean, sharp, and tight. Almost as if it should sound as it should have been when they programed the song. The original SID is Crunchy, muddy, and soft. If I had a 64 with a bad SID, I would be aiming for the ARMSID as a direct drop in. I'm impressed!
Ugh, my boss decided that the meeting room that he's using as his temporary office needed vacuuming right in the middle of watching this video. At least the parts on the ARMSID that I could hear properly sounded great.
Something you may not have considered...
Who's to say after nearly 40 years if OEM SID chips sound exactly the same as they did when they were fresh from the factory?
I do think the ArmSID sounds better for the most part.
I'm sure a good number of people back in the 80s made audio recordings from their C64s. That would give a good idea if the sound has changed with age.
We should all be grateful to those who continue to produce products for these old machines to keep then alive. These old systems are what I started out with and I have so many memories of my childhood blowing entire weekends through just glued to the monitor with my brothers. I especially love when parents expose their children to this old tech - it helps them experience what we did and see how far technology has come.
Looking forward to a video about configuring the ARMSID
The late programmers of the SID chip did not adhere to the specifications but pushed the digital to analog converter and filter to the limits.
It is very difficult to digitally replicate the analog SID chip. I think the ARMSID succeeded in doing this.
If anything, the digital interference noises from the original SID are now missing.
You mean like when you have the volume turned up and you can hear the 1541 through the speaker? 😉
@@Renville80 not C64 related, but in certain cars you can get interference on the AM/FM radio when you rev the engine. Probably because of the alternator.
I was very impressed by that last one especially! Since it’s all done through the filter. I wonder if it’s just that accurate, or if there’s some way to decipher the intended digital audio from the signals and decode it in a more efficient way? But then it wouldn’t necessarily sound distorted in the same way right? So I guess it must be the first one. Damn.
Actually for a C64 and given it's a mid 1980's, inexpensive home computer, it sounds VERY good. It was never meant to be a sound system and yet it's not bad at all.
Thanks for the demo !!
Another torture test might be to try some of the voice synthesis effects from games like Beach Head II, Ghostbusters, etc. Those effects really seemed to push the SID, and always sounded a little different SID to SID.
21:07 - Yeah I had a C64 at the time of Turbo Outrun, and I had the game ( i think I've still got it on tape), and I was blown away, the music sounded amazing, i couldn't believe the C64 could do it. What you don't get when you hear this with 2021 ears, is that Turbo Outrun had long loading times. There was a long load from tape to get the to that screen where the digitized music played, then i think you picked your settings, then it loaded again to get into the main game. It was quite tedious if you were playing from cassette. Still the intro music made it worth it. I certainly remember this game (and it's been a long time).
First impression is it’s very accurate sounding to certain Sid chips, but it’s overall quieter. That said, I really enjoy it’s sound.
I have an ARMSID too (and contrary to what is said in the video, it’s very inexpensive, at least in Europe: 28 EUR, taxes included). My first impression was not good. Since I couldn’t use my chip puller (the thing is higher than your average real IC), I removed it by hand and… broke three legs. I was finally able to fix it by putting it in a second stronger socket and pour some solder into the holes (took me hours, but that’s another story). So be aware that you have to be extremely delicate when you handle it.
Maybe it’s a placebo effect (happens all the time with music), but its sound seems too “dry”, “clinical" compared to my real 6581’s. In all honesty, it does a better job than a 6581 (less noise, predictable results, ability to change the curves to your own liking), but something is lost because of that perfection. It’s a bit like the eternal debate of vinyl vs CD. The so-called added warmness of the vinyls is in fact due to it being analogue and less precise (also, the music I listen to was originaly created for that medium, just like the SID tunes were originaly created, well, for the SID). If it makes any sense, I’d say that the analog modeling is too perfect, that the dirtyness of the real analog thing is lost in the process.
I hope that future firmware upgrades will make it even better. But, to be completely honest, it’s the irony that Adrian points at the end of the video that bugs me: I’m not comfortable with the idea of having a CPU that’s orders of magnitude more powerful than the complete C64 in my SID.
The configuration programme is nice, easy to use, fast and all, but it lacks the most elementary thing: a built-in SID player, which means you have to configure it, reset the computer, load a tune, then go back to the configurator, flash another configuration, reset the computer and load the tune again to compare. It would be really nice to do it in real time, with an integrated SID player (the three SID tunes I use for my tests are Ghost’n’Goblins, Commando and, of course, the 2016 remake of Donkey Kong’s original score best known as Adrian’s Dance Party :)).
Two things I didn’t test but would be of interest to me are to determine if the ARMSID, being an emulator, adds some lag (must be nanoseconds, so I’m not really equipped to test that). The second thing I’d like to test is how it compares to the ReSID emulator with filter emulation and full resampling, running on Vice (or other emulators that use it).
Well, Adrian, if you ever make a follow-up to that video, feel free to use my ideas! ;)
Man, it must be really awesome to listen to these tune on old computers in person. Kinda like classical music of computers
I really like these old synthesizers and it's really interesting hearing different ones and how they progressed through the years. With video games remakes can be difficult to replicate when it comes to music because of how many different synthesizers were used and how they were mixed.
I've been waiting for you to review one of these. Great to see (and hear).
I had a ZX Spectrum in the 80s. But one of my friends had a C64 which I would play on whenever when I would visit him. While I loved my speccy I wished I had a C64 as well. It's cool to be reliving this stuff with your channel. Maybe one of these days I buy me an authentic C64 and retro mod it.
I do not own a commodore.
I've never heard any of these pieces of music
And my judgment is not clouded by nostalgia
For me the one called ARMSID is clearly a better player.
Now that may not reflect the authentic sound but if I didn't have a sid chip that worked I'd happily put this in my commodore if I had one.
In the meanwhile, there's a new development on this side of the water, named 'SIDKick", which is basedon ARM, too, but with much higher processing performance and more accuracy, as it can run resid 1.0 opposed to the ARMSID's resid 0.16 emulation. And btw: It also emulated paddle/mouse AND the sound expander (fmOPL) :)
To watch Adrian conduct the music and air-drum is priceless!
Amazing content... Adrian, sids, amazing c64 musicians and comments discussing finer details of sids
Excellent :)
Sounds like it needs to have output level maybe 3dB louder just to be perfect, but you can simply turn up your speakers lol
Its great to have more hardware replacement options.
Like many of these things, you know the host chip could run circles around the whole machine its been put into. Which is a bit "inelegant", if you're being persnickety.
Probably done with less die space though :)
Glad you liked this Adrian, I'm a fan too. Another benefit over the Swinsid is that ARMSid perfectly handles paddle/analogue input, which the Swinsid doesn't handle at all. I love paddle games. (Apologies if someone has already mentioned this in the comments, there are hundreds to read through.)
There's a gnarly distortion on the 6581 that just sounds great. I say that as someone who is not that familiar with the C64. In the future, these chips/the software needs some distortion emulation to really get the sound perfect. It probably still won't be as cool as that gritty distortion on the 6581, which I'm sure wasn't by design, but sure sounds cool.
The wave / noise sound on the "Real" Sid sounds way more analog like a untuned radio. I guess its really hard to emulate analog behaviour for white noise and filters. It sounds very good for under 30 euros.
Noise was never analogue, it's an LFSR; but it does get clocked at 1 MHz, which can be an issue, and there are parasitic behaviours in the DAC and filter which i don't know if they're truly researched that well.
The noise in the SID chip is generated by an LFSR though. It's far from "real" analog noise. Though, with all these SID replacement chips, I wonder if a better noise waveform would be cool, or maybe it would just be heresy, haha. Pretty sure few program rely on the exact properties of SID waveform 3 (as opposed to just using it as a random number source).
@@Mnnvint i was thinking about playing a (random part of a long) sample of the original noise instead of generating your own. I wonder if this would be possible and if that solution could sound nice.
the swooshing on legend is rain or wind and the drum is a taiko drum... :D
Pretty great synthesizer... what an understatement...
its freakin' awesome... there you have it ! :-)
Thanks for sharing..
(I personally still prefer the original SID by a significant margin... but I liked both the Ode to C64 and the Turbo Outrun quite a lot on the ARMSID..)
Seeing your reactions to the ARMSid is really wholesome. It's really an impressive piece of kit!
Wow, i am more of a x86 computer nerd and did not do much on the C64, appart from some games and dabled some basic on someone elses. But this was freaking interesting. You just got to love how good that chip was from this time period. Cool video!
You look like an actor in every Steven Spielberg movie ever made.
lol
are you referring to Richard Dreyfuss?
Richard Dreyfuss? :)
He reminds me of Richard Dreyfuss in Mr Holland's Opus
I had discovered the ARMSID a few years ago and deemed it the ONLY suitable replacement to the genuine SID. Years later my thoughts have not changed. It's like $40 shipped to the USA...so it's pretty cheap all things considered. The configuration tool really puts it over the top as you can really adjust it in ways you just can't do with the stock SID. And, the firmware is updatable right from the C64 using the tool. Really amazing stuff.
This is one of the best channels!!
I thought the sound from the ArmSID was cleaner than that of the original SID. Like the difference between a cassette with Dolby B noise-reduction turned on, and one with it turned off. Less hiss, but slightly quieter highs -- just like what Dolby B seemed to do back in the day when you'd record on a tape with it turned on.
I would absolutely have no qualms whatsoever about buying one of these chips instead of a real SID chip, were the one in my C64 to go bad. A brand new product with a warranty? Yes please! Much better than relying on a used one sold "as is" on eBay, even though I'm sure it'd be more expensive. I'd take it in a second.
Thanks for showing us this!
@Adrian Thanks for the review. I'm using the ARMSIDs over 1 year and I feel the same way about it :-) Great small and cheap SID Chip that makes you forget the original SID ;-)
Just plugged my armsid, tested few, amazing. Subtle improvements and faithful to the original sid. Richer sound but always in subtle way.
Very impressed how the armsid sounds. Thanks for the comparison video:)
The ARMSID sounds amazing! Would love to make some ringtones out of these SID tracks.
If you search, they are out there.
Watching Adrian just enjoy Music is great haha !
Hey Adrian, thanks for turning me into this. I finally got my Commodore 64 “working” over this weekend finally (rust). Voices 2 and 3 on the SID are dead. I just ordered one of these to replace it.
Hey Adrian, there's a couple of tracks you may want to try out with the various SIDs.
Spellbound by Rob Hubbard
C64 Forever by Linus
64 forever is a really impressive track.
Acrouzet's channel is good for some awesome sids, with visualizations and all.
Kim Christensen's (Future Freak) Great Tune sounds different on almost every of the like 14 C64s I have so I guess it's a Great Tune (ba-dum tss) to adjust the ARMSID to your pleasing.
I think Adrian should host a late night program on public broadcasting called "Sounds From Your Inner SID".
🎹🎹🎹 Is that only my impression or does genuide SID give slightly more soft music that ArmSID? 🎶🎶🎶
I thought the same thing. I'd guess the transistors in the original have a slower transition time, resulting in reduced high frequency noise, compared to the arm sid.
It's like an LED light compared to a tungsten light - the notes start and stop instantly, with the SID, there is a slight "fade".
@@tolkienfan1972 Good to hear that someone share the same impression. 💪😁
@@brookewestonctc speaking of which, if you haven’t seen the project to emulate incandescent indicator lamps in an IBM mainframe panel, by using fancy nanopixel LEDs (or whatever they’re called); then I think you might get a kick from checking it out.
Started by some guys who were bothered by the indicators not looking right with regular warm white LED replacements, as you can really easily tell which ones they replaced and which are original from the outside, especially when blinking very quickly. The code ended up way more complicated than they expected to capture the intricacies of timing and that cherry red to peach to yellow colour gradient.
ARMSid is an outstanding replacement. I actually prefer it to some degree, less muddy and tighter sound. Awesome stuff Adrian.
What I have taken notice on, os that there are a few sounds, that are more audiable/hearable on the ARMSID. At least that is how it sounds in my machines. Although I have had the first setting, dialed three notches down in the config menu. Default settings sound a bit off, and 4 notches down, it starts to go off again. I say three down is the sweetspot, as far as I remember how the 80's sounded like back in the days.
I am really pleased by the ARMSID, and replace every SID with one, once they go bad. For the price, it has no competition.
Best thing about this video is seeing Adrian rocking to the music.
Great review Adrian. The price doesn’t seem bad to me, €28 plus shipping from Europe. Better than gambling on an original that could die the day after you install it.
I would love to see an episode devoted to the Amiga tracker scene. I've listened to some amazing tracker songs back in the day. Some even with vocals, which is not necessarily easy to do.
Wondering why somebody can't develop an ASIC version of the SID, which could be transistor accurate. But probably not monetarily worth it, but that would be the best way.
Hugely expensive to do, and no doubt a huge minimum order size, at least by retro C64 standards. Meaning each chip would be priced out of most people's budget. There is just no way anyone could make their money back on it, even if you could find someone willing to bankroll it.
@@another3997 I know. But doggone it, it would be nice. It would not be bad if you could get economy of scale, but that will never happen for such a niche market.
The 'BOOM BOOM!' in that "Legend" track reminds of a damn cool early demo I got from someone around 1987 that had an animated man pounding on a huge kettle-drum to make that sound while some strange space-opera played in the window beside him. Was very cool, I wish I remembered the name or could find it again today. There's a few early what would be called 'demos' now that just had awesome music playing over beautiful (for the day) images that I loved to play as a kid that I wish I could find again. I need to do a deep dive into Lemon or whatever the big C64 archive is these days.
Honestly, with the ARMSID, it sounds like there's some built-in waveform interpolation while the waveforms are being modulated. Sounds super clean - i almost prefer it over the 6581AR
Hey, Adrian, this is some good music. Maybe a video one day going into some depth on C-64 music. As time goes on it will become a question of how many 32 bit computers does it take to Run a C64 8 bit?
The digital part's emulation is a yawn to modern systems, but analog emulation is a whole new can of worms.
Yeah, would be great to see and hear good old Rob Hubbard music again for instance
I must admit I really dig the new camera angles!
I love the 6581R4AR. It is by far my favorite of the 6581 revisions.
In a dual-socket setup (typically the Reloaded MK2), I use a 6581R4AR and 8580R5. With that combination, I have almost the entirety of the High Voltage SID Collection covered... unless I'm specifically wanting to listen to 2SID files.
Already mentioned here int he comments, but it's amusing to think that the ARM chip is making itself known in what was a competitor computer from the time, given the original ARM CPU was the Acorn RISC Machine processor, which is now a worldwide legacy from a formerly little British computer company... :D
I had a C64 around 1987 and when I played outrun for the first time then I was indeed blown away of the samples. Fun fact, when you play outrun on the later C64 model the sample would not be played by the SID chip.
So a sid replacement with a CPU that is more powerful than the computer it serves. Nice
That's traditional for the C64 :D Even many of the disk drives technically had more powerful CPU's than the 64 itself back in the day (same chip, but clocked at higher frequency)
It will be at least an order of magnitude more powerful... as Adrian says, very likely the whole C64 could be emulated at ease in the ARMSID
The happy Sid chips are having a party inside your C64!
Adrian is Mr. Rogers Neighborhood for a certain kind of adult weirdo. Based. Love this channel so much.
I've never even powered on a C64, or heard one of those scores, but listening to Ode to C64 almost made me feel like I I missed out on something! That said, it sounded much nicer on the ARMSID! Amazing difference...
Now you just need some sort of VIC/VIC II replacement and you've got an entirely OEM Commodore lineup.
search VIC-II Kawari
Oh man, I remember those days. The quality of those sounds was bad, even back then..LOL But that was the best you could get.
The arm Sid has more depth and sharper waves, perhaps capture the output with an oscilloscope and compare them again.
Yeah, when listening to the noise sweep at the start of one of the songs, you can hear that the filters are very different. Still, it sounds great.
I had C-64 C in 1989, but sadly didn't have the Turbo Outrun game. That digitized intro would've been very cool and impressive back then, sounded almost like it's from Amiga 500 :)
Hi would like to thank you for this wonderful review , your time spent on this is fantastic I've recently restored a c64 watched your video and bought a arm sid , as the c64 i have had a bad pla chip and the sid was running hot and the music was playing fast or advanced, haven't put it fully to the test as yet ! Looking forward to the arm sid to arrive
Thank you x
The product is decent! Especially because it's configurable. I hope that the authors will make it further and go to a single big IC version if it's cheaper. I think on Kickstarter it can blow up :)
Not talking about chip shortages (in some cases it's just speculations) I think that the mass production price can be around 15-20 euro. I would like to assemble a decent SID based analog synths (there are some projects as I remember) so it needs SIDs... And actually it's the strong part that these ARMSIDs are configurable so you can make little changes in every chip and they will sound a bit (or not a bit) different. This will make a synth sound real (not like a VST plugin).
that was the best sound i have herd from the commodore 64 it was great
21:51 gives me a merch idea. Adrian bobblehead. :D
First time I have heard legend intro. Gotta say the armSID was cleaner. But the noise channel was overpowering in that track. Not sure if configurable but I would definitely prefer a middle ground between the two chips.
Adrian, please review that Chameleon 64, I always wanted to know what I missed back when they were released some years ago.
Listening to this at work with the headphones and it’s pretty incredible. 🎧
I'm in genuine awe at how decked out your c64 is inside
Sounds really good. I did notice one thing though and I think it's because the ARMSID is so much clearer ... the attack on certain sounds came through very abrupt and jarring. It may be that the addition noise on original SIDs is just masking that.
the ARMSID is perfect for me. i heard almost no differences.
If my SID chip breaks then this is the good alternative. So that the C64 works as long as possible.
Great to see the armsid and the chameleon again. Armsid is a nice replacement for the aging sids and nice to see the Chameleon again hope to see it in a future video the number of cores it can do is slowly growing…… also the chameleon has a sound implementation on it own…
We'll see. I know people are super sensitive to variances from the real chips. I can't always hear these things myself, but musicians are highly tuned to this.
Thanks for reviewing this SID replacement Adrian, it's inevitable that we all need to replace those chips sooner or later and its nice to see (and hear) drop-in replacements. Are you also going to review the BackSID from Evie? (from the creator of the BackBit cartridge). As always, I love to watch your channel and I hope to see many more videos from you (especially the followup with the Tandy computer you recently posted which was full of leaves and spider eggs).
Keep up the great work Adrian
The ArmSid is a much cleaner sound than the original SID chip, so I feel that it is well worth the investment to get the ARMSID.
I have no experience with C64s or their ilk. But that ARMSID chip gives very clean audio, no hint of "overload" or mushyness. Since those things are hard to get, it looks like a good replacement.
well, it doesnt get more exciting than seeing a new replacement for Commodore 64 custom chips such as the VIC-II or the SID !
I am happy with the UltiSID, SwinSID and ArmSID. The best part is that the UltiSID and ArmSID have mouse support. Looking forward to trying the BackSID. Adrian, try the music in VICE to see how things sound.
I love these sids:
Stefan Hartwig
- Ultimate_Intro_Studio_tune_07 (aka the Loader Theme of Myth)
Fredrik Segerfalk
- Shadow of the Beast (the main overworld theme, it has that deep bass, the underground theme is really good too)
Steve Rowlands - Creatures and Creatures 2 (any track, but I like the second game better)
ARMSID does a really good job. I bougt one about a year ago. I did not regret. It's in my 250466 C64 :)
Imagine if you and "The 8-bit Guy" made a shared video, awesome 🤩
Also, I really want to hear Monty on the Run through ARMSID :D
These glitch clickings in the bass track of the Donkey Kong track (and lots of other tunes) are audible on many of the earlier 6581 SIDs, so the ARMSID emulates their flaws as well.
Can you please try it with kb's music for Smash Designs' Second Reality C64 version, that stuff bangs and sounds like it's kinda hard with the trickery on the SID
Throw some Pink Floyd at that ARMSID. I wanna hear Welcome to the Machine.
I am not commodore user, never owned one, but I have to say that ArmSid has cleaner better sound than original. But maybe because the sound is better it takes away a but that 8-bit noisy feeling.