MIDISID Monday 13 Jun

This week I've continued to work on the menu / controls and have added something that I'm really pleased with. I've made a video demonstration, with commentary - below the video is a transcript with pictures in case, like me, you prefer text and images.

(If you need background, the SID is the sound chip from the Commodore 64, it's a 3-oscillator synthesizer with many features; wave, envelope, pulse width, filters, ring modulation. I'm driving it here with a microcontroller and writing the software to turn this into a midi sound module / musical instrument.)



I'd like to demonstrate a feature that I've just added, which I'm really pleased with.

Today I've got a MIDI keyboard beside me, plugged into MIDISID using the DIN socket. Its output is audio and I've got that plugged into a portable speaker. I'll be using the polyphonic mode, which puts the same sound on all of the SID voices available and allows you to play up to (in this case with 2 sids).

So let's have a quick look at the instrument selection. I showed this last week, but I've done a little more work on some of the instruments. Here's harpsichord which I've just added.


The second push button is a 'menu up' button, and if we go back to the top and then polyphonic mode again, instead of choosing instruments we can go into parameters. Here's the wave selection, obviously the four different waveforms that the SID has. (Note that as I'm using a graphic OLED I can draw the waveforms.)


Back up and we can go into ADSR, the note envelope. And see how easily we can adjust all four parameters at once, and see a drawing of the envelope


This isn't new. I did this already in the C64 version of this software, which I called the Knottifier,

But that was controlled with a joystick and the two paddles.  To be able to adjust all four of these parameters with four knobs makes this really nice an really easy. 

This is the dream I've long had. To be able to play with the settings of the SID this easily, to play notes using a keyboard and record the audio. 

As you saw this is just one of three modes that this device has and in future updates I'll demonstrate some other cool things that you'll be able to do with it.





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