PAULA MIDI SYNTH BOX Like SID BOX?

[Iggy]

Paula is a plain D/A chip with two butterworth filters. It doesn't offer anything special. The SID has custom and rare "faulty" chip die with a special sound.

Well, frankly neither is anything special.
If I was building a retro system today, I'd use a cheap Yamaha sound chip with wavetable capability and Midi support.

These run about $4.00 on eBay.
Paula's start at about $8.00.
And the prices people pay for SIDs (many of which are faulty or fake) is plainly stupid.

If you like some pointers to useful Yamaha designs i can show you a few.

Frankly, Commodore fanatics have always dismayed me.
I mean, get over it guys, the 6502/6510 was a pretty lousy processor.
I've always preferred Motorola's stuff.
And the Amiga is neat, but as a hardware focused system (rather than something more adaptable with drivers for varying hardware). It was doomed to fail as hardware development accelerated faster than Commodore could keep up with.

[Iggy]

Oh pshaw. The SID will blow any generic-ass wavetable GM box completely out of the water for sheer sonic character. Hell, even Yamaha's old FM chips would outshine the generic XG crap they poop out now, if used well. And hey, Paula as well has its own particular character (thanks to the gritty early digital sound tamed by a bit of filtering,) even if it is just a sample-playback affair.

But it's silly to think that it'd be worth the trouble trying to create a dedicated module version; for one thing, as freqmax points out, Paula itself is only DACs and filters, and requires Agnus to actually get its data. For another, you need a system to load samples into memory, interpret incoming MIDI events, assign channels, and apply effects like volume envelopes anyway. At that point, you're already halfway to an Amiga.

Actually, its the FM series I am thinking about building into a 63C09E design I am bread boarding.
And as to character, yeah SID sound is identifiable.
I don't know that that makes it more desirable.
And Midi compatibility (which the SID doesn't have) is nothing to scoff about.

BTW - I can tell you DO know what you are talking about, because I would go with an FM over an XG design myself. 2 to 4 meg wavetable in rom or ram?
Yeah, sometimes the older hardware just had more capability.
Unfortunately, as processor have become more powerful, sound chips have kind off de-evolved.
The AC'97 spec is a joke.

[Iggy]

What definition of the world "special" do you subscribe to, not to include the SID?


I think that if the qualities of the CPU was the question for any of these people, they would have abandoned their platform a long time ago (along with the M68k series).

didn't mean to piss you  off,.
At the time it was produced the SID was pretty remarkable.
Compared to the 6502 its a work of art.
The 6502 is little more than an attempt to undercut 6800 pricing.
The design holds no attraction for me.

And if we have all stopped use old processor like the 68K, how come I can still use 68K machine code under MorphOS?
And believe me, its being done. New code.
Because its still backward compatible.

We are just a really stubborn bunch.

[Iggy]

Yeah John,
When I first thought about building a simple HD63C09E based system I was considering something simpler like the old single channel YM2149 (which is really just yamaha's knock off of the old General Instruments AY-3-8910).
But the FMs can be had at exactly the same price.
Sure I've got to add some circuits, but when you can get an eight bit PIC MCU with four ten bit A to D converters for $1.99 is that really an issue?

I always envied the chips used in later MSX machines and their add ons thanks to all the capabilities that Yamaha squeezed into these devices.

While the SID may hold a special place in the heart of commodore fanatics, i'd take the OPL3 over the SID or Paula any day.

There was a big mistake made by both the Commodore camp and those of us focusing on 68K OS-9.
We were fixated on the hardware instead of making sure that the drivers added enough of an abstraction layer that we could support variations in hardware.

I still dread thinking about those horrible OS-9 based CD-I players and their dreadful Signetics 68070 processor (and the attendant chipset).
They could have standardized around a disc standard, but no Phillips had to specify the entire hardware platform.

That's why when so of you are so insistent that specific hardware makes an Amiga i get dismayed.

If Amiga OS had forced programmers to work via drivers rather than allowing direct hardware banging, the entire platform would have been able to evolve quicker.

[Iggy]

Fair enough, but my point is that to most C64 programmers, the CPU is more or less just a means to an end. The fun stuff is the VIC-II and the SID. The Amiga community seems to have been very CPU-centric, in comparison.

Well, the 68K was a pretty cool processor during a period when X86s were dreadful, and I've gotten a big kick out of the 6809 and the superset in the Hitachi 6309, but I must admit that with its video and sound capability the C64 would have been successful with just about any processor.

It was probably the only machine of its time that you could write good video games with using BASIC.

And while I've mentioned some MSX sound chips, I didn't really care for the Z-80 either.

[Iggy]

A Hitachi 6309 would have been awesome!

They are still around.
There is even a PLCC 44 pin square version.
The 3 Mhz version can be clocked anywhere between 3.58 to 5 Mhz.

And there are 20MHz versions of the Z-80 and 8MHz (or higher) 6502 and 6502 derivatives.

[Iggy]

The eZ80 is very fast and the 32bit Z380 looks rather nice too. Shame it was only ever used in washing machines.

Z-380, huh?
Never saw that one before.
Neat.

[Iggy]

http://hackaday.com/2012/10/18/creating-a-midi-synth-from-a-commodore-sid/

The address says it all.