CODE & BOOKS
Cover of C64 SID Audio: white and cyan title on dark navy, a rainbow band with a treble clef and notes on a staff, lines of 6510 code that write to the SID, a MOS SID 6581 · 8580 chip and the C64 logo.
Commodore 64Coming soon

C64 SID Audio

Programming Sound, SFX, and Chiptunes on the MOS 6581 and 8580 SID Chips

by Aravind J. Deshmukh, Eric A. Norton and Jorah Sallow

On Amazon

The Amazon link for this book is coming soon.

The code

The code will be published here together with the book.

Give the Commodore 64 its voice

The SID gave the Commodore 64 its voice: three oscillators, four waveforms, an envelope on every voice, a resonant filter, and twenty-nine registers. C64 SID Audio teaches you to program it, from the first POKE to a music driver of your own, in 6510 assembly and in BASIC.

Nothing is taken on trust. Every program was run in the VICE emulator, what it played was recorded, and every number the book gives was measured by a program written to measure it: on the 6581 and on the 8580, on PAL and on NTSC machines.

No music theory is needed: the book begins with what sound is, and with the notes, scales and chords a programmer needs. The code comes with a script that rebuilds every program and checks, byte for byte, that the listings are the programs.

Inside the book

  • Waveforms, pulse width, noise, envelopes, and the filter, register by register
  • Interrupt-driven players: sequences, instruments, vibrato, arpeggios, and drums
  • Sound effects and music sharing three voices, on a budget of cycles
  • Three complete projects: a music driver with an original song, a fully scored game, and a synthesizer you play on the keyboard
  • Beyond the limit: samples, multispeed players, a second SID, .sid files, and GoatTracker

What makes this book different

  • Nothing taken on trust

    Every program was run in the VICE emulator, what it played was recorded, and every number in the book was measured by a program written to measure it, on the 6581 and the 8580, on PAL and NTSC machines.

  • No music theory needed

    The book begins with what sound is, and with the notes, scales and chords a programmer needs.

  • Three complete projects

    A music driver with an original song, a fully scored game, and a synthesizer you play on the keyboard.

  • 613 solved exercises

    Across 34 chapters, with 305 figures and 596 recordings of what the programs play.

Errata

Corrections

No errors have been reported for this edition yet.

Found a mistake? Write to [email protected], with the page number and what it should say.