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On Wed, 17 Oct 2001, Lundgren Jarmo wrote:

> Whoa - you can do miracles with that, then.... Commodore 64 had - what? -
> three channels plus the noise channel? Or was it four channels and any of
> those could do FM or noise? Hmmm...

Where does everyone always get the three+noise thing?  That's Atari ST or
something, yuck =)...  Everyone should know =) that the SID has three
voices, which can be sine, saw, noise, or pulse, where the pulsewidth is
adjustable from 0 to $fff (12 bits), but only the upper 8-or-so bits of
that "count".  The waveform can also be a combination of any of those, but
most of the combinations sound lame.  Each voice can be "ring modulated
by" or "synchronized to" another voice's frequency..  The waveform or
other parameters of the "modulating voice" do not affect the outcome, and
usually those effects only sound cool when the "voice that is being
modulated" is the sine waveform.  Except when it's the "pulse+sine"
waveform (5), which makes it sound like a totally distorted and
resonated... thingy.

Each voice has an ADSR-envelope, where each of the parameters is 4-bit.
Most if not all of the software SID players on the PC do not work right,
because they think that that peak volume for the envelope is the
sustain-value, when in fact it's always the same "maximum", even if
sustain is 0...  So nowadays when you make SID-music, you always have to
set the sustain to $F or otherwise the voice will be too silent on some
g'ddaammm sidplay4win or emulator.

Then there's a global 12db filter, where you can select
lowpass/highpass/bandpass or any combination.  The frequency register is
16-bit, but I have no idea about how many of those bits actually
"count".  Resonance register is 4-bit, but it has little effect...  You
can just about hear the difference when using bandpass. You can assign the
filter to any combination of the voices.

And there's a 4-bit global volume, that can be used to play samples.

In fact, most of the SID registers can be used to play samples, so the
urban legend says that if you poke 16-bit sampledata into the 16-bit
filter frequency register, you can hear 16-bit sampledata from the sound
output.

..I wonder what I left out.

Anyway - restricted? =)  What are you talking about? =)

--
tero

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