c64 and amiga donation wanted...

[commodorejohn]

I'd try putting an ad in your local paper(s) - if your area has one or two local rags with free classifieds, it won't cost you anything to try, and if you're lucky you can get a C64 setup for $0-20 and possibly an Amiga for $30-50. You'd be surprised at how often people still have this stuff hanging around in their attic, even in this day and age.

[commodorejohn]

P.S. Excellent choice in studio gear

[commodorejohn]

I'd seriously try the papers, though (again, if you have a local rag with free ads and nothing to lose...) Craigslist is great, but there's a lot of older folks (read: original C64 owner demographic) who don't go there and may not have even heard of it, but who do read the papers. Additionally, actually putting out want ads is a world apart from just watching and waiting. Lots of people have stuff that's just inertly taking up space in their attic that they feel no particular pressure to get rid of and may have just about forgotten, but if they see that someone is actively seeking it, that both jogs their memory and motivates them in a way that mere "I should probably get rid of this eventually" thinking won't. Trust me, it's worth a try.

[commodorejohn]

Even apart from nostalgia, there's very solid arguments to be made for actual hardware music gear, no matter how space-convenient a DAW is. Plenty of emulators don't do more than loosely approximate the sounds of hardware synths (and the SID filter in particular has never been emulated more than approximately,) and even with the Amiga UAE just doesn't quite have the same tone to it as the real thing.

[commodorejohn]

An fpga SID can emulate everything well except the filters. A SID is very small in fpga and doesn't require DMA for it's looped "synthesizing". There was a recent discussion about adding SID capabilities to an enhanced Paula in fpga for this reason. I would bet money that someone has already had a Paula and SID in the same fpga before too. How good an fpga could make it sound, I don't know. It probably would sound different but hopefully better than software emulation. There are 2 different versions of the SID too. Most people prefer the early one with more distortion over the later bug fixed version with cleaner sound.

The thing is that "everything except the filters" is missing the single most important element in defining the SID's character. It's like the hallowed Moog filter - instantly recognizable, quirky and full of character, and it leaves an unmistakeable imprint on everything you subject to it. A SID without the SID filter is just some well-executed simple digital waveforms; it's not the SID. And a SID with a poor imitation of the SID filter is a weaksauce, plastic substitute.

[commodorejohn]

Much easier than recording real SID sound and trying to mix it in as it cuts through the mix and you have to do heavy EQ to get it right and then it's nothing like original ...

Hey, sometimes cutting through a mix is what you want out of a synth. (If you don't want the sound of a SID, why try to get the sound of a SID?)

[commodorejohn]

I dunno, if you throw 2ghz worth of 32bit x86 at the latest reSID it can handle stuff like the SFX in Star Ranger or Hubbard tunes like Lightforce very competently.

It's definitely better than it was (at least they're trying to emulate nonlinear filter response now! Embarassing how long that took, considering that no analog filters have ever had a linear response curve.) Still, when you have to throw a 2GHz CPU at something just to get an acceptable result, I'd have to maintain that real hardware is the better option.