Or don't.
I once messaged that guy in the band and he had NFI what I was talking about when I mentioned SID/C64. That instantly made what they were doing seem pretty meh and fake as far as I care.
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Eh. The SID is great for music, but really sucks for games most of the time. Look at how many games either have SFX OR music. (Armalyte, R-Type).
So many games have decent music, but then the blaring noisy SFX kick in and ruin the hell out of it..... if your work around is omitting SFX, then you've done it wrong.
There are always exceptions to this. Parallax for example does music and SFX good. So does Myth, and Neverending Story 2 for example.
Also:
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--The NES didn't have rubbish sound. Don't be crazy.
--The MSX has great FM music. Don't leave it out. Add in the Konami SCC, and there you go. Mix in the stock AY chip, and you have 17 channels of chip-music to be had.
--In the same vein as SCC, is the PC-Engine. That soundchip never disappoints. R-Type sounds like crap on Amiga in comparsion.
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I think there is plenty of remembrance for stuff other than Paula and SID.
The reason the SID chip is "so great" though, is that it is an actual synthesizer, rather than a PSG. You generate waveforms and filter/shape the sounds just like you would with say a Roland SH-101 (which you can make sound exactly like a SID, so the SID isn't exactly unique).
Other chips of the time were just bleepbloopers, while the SID was a shweeeepshwooooooper. It set it apart in a good way from other computers. Honestly, if the SID wasn't there, alot of the games would suck.
Though I really think the people that go all out of their way to make DIY synths out of SIDs are going a bit overboard, esp since the SID is pretty accident prone. A roland or moog is way more reliable.
Good music is good music, technicalities aside. To me though all NES games were plinky plonk rubbish, and SNES games are very orchestral/General MIDI sounding. The artistic talent just isn't there like some of the great SIDs or stuff like Ghouls n Ghosts on Amiga. It's not a cultural thing because games like Vulcan Venture have awesome soundtracks in the arcade and the Sony chip in the SNES is technically good too. Yes Ghouls n Ghosts IS a crap conversion on Amiga (thanks to idiots hired by US Gold AGAIN!) BUT the music is light years ahead of the rubbish on the console versions. Limiting factor for Amiga games music was the floppy disk, but then cartridges have unlimited memory, With a hard drive on an A600 you could use all 1mb per level nicely without worrying about how many disk swaps would happen.
If anything sounds crap on Amiga it is down to one of two things...
1. Not enough sound channels..tricky to overcome for CPU hogging games code. Most games don't have enough channels to play with, Hybris is a good early example.
2. Crap samples/coding....easy to overcome...bit of a no-brainer in todays all digital world.
Usually it is 2 not 1 though as far as music quality goes, music and effects together has always been tricky on most home computers due to limited total numbers of sound channels. You can't really help it and in some ways I wish the PC version of Super Stardust had used different MOD samples as ultimately those amazing tunes are now forever compromised due to the samples used, necessary though as with just a 14mhz 020 there isn't enough CPU time left to do virtual 6 channel sound AND all the other funky stuff @ 50fps on one of the finest retro remakes ever made for any system. Such a shame the CD32/PC-CD versions used inferior music done on what sounds like a cheap Casio synth from a mail order catalogue for 100 bucks!
And yes as I stated the SID is a simpler version of many early analogue synths, sounds similar to very early 80s synth pop for a very good reason. You either like that kind of sound or you don't.
Ultimately what I do like about both Amiga and C64 sound hardware is that it is possible to get wildly different results, an ST always sounds like an ST unless samples are used, so does a Sinclair, NES and an Amstrad, that AY/YM chip is barely OK in ST/ZX/CPC but nothing to write home about. MSX was a bit of a golden turkey in the EU, so all I remember is for music Yamaha was the one to get as it had extra sound capabilities as standard....rather than getting a Toshiba one (most prevalent on ebay sadly).
But ultimately I have not heard a realistic, or otherwise, electric guitar sound produced from an 80s computer soundchip via waveforms alone except for a certain short tune from Wizball. And guess what one of the first A/V demos of the A1000 shipped to TV shows had on it....could it be an electric guitar sample played via the computer keyboard Protracker style....never
Of all the non Commodore machines of the 80s that aurally peeked my interest was probably the Megadrive (Genesis), the tunes on Gauntlet IV and Thunderforce III are just so nice, but at the same time they're different to either MODs or SIDs.
I don't really care what the badge is on a machine, only what comes out the speakers, and to be brutally honest there were better SID soundtracks in the mid 80s than commercial music on the whole in my personal opinion, music was just so boring in the charts in my childhood once experimental synth pop was killed off for plinky plonk pop music crap!