About | The Books | People | Songs | Guest Book | Links
| Introduction |
| Timeline |
| Articles |
| .mus File Format |
| Source Code |
Yes, yes, I have been neglecting this web site. I know. I keep hoping for a big block of free time to get back into it, but there are always so many other things to do...
But I hope you have fun browsing this site as it is, and reminiscing as you listen to some Commodore 64 oldies. You also have to visit John Mackey's blog. It is always a fun read.
Here are some important dates and events in the history of COMPUTE!'s Sidplayer, as best as I can remember them (corrections and additions are welcome).
| 1981 | Bob Yannes, system architect for the Commodore 64, in January starts designing a "synthesizer on a chip" to sell to whoever wants to make "the world's best video game." Completed in November, it is labeled the MOS 6581 chip and known as SID for Sound Interface Device. |
| May, 1981 | High school students Harry Bratt and Craig Chamberlain meet each other at a career interest exploring seminar sponsored by Federal Mogul Corporation. |
| 1982 | The Commodore 64, using the SID chip, is shown at the Winter CES show in January. Volume shipment begins in August. |
| October, 1982 | Craig and Harry publish the Pokey Player music system for the Atari home computer in SoftSide magazine. It is named for the POKEY chip in the Atari. This chip controls the POts (short for potentiometers, referring to paddle game controllers) and the KEYboard and also includes four tone generators. Craig is now a student at The University of Michigan. |
| April, 1983 | Scott Card, editor at COMPUTE! Books, contacts Craig about rewriting Pokey Player and publishing it in book form. Sheldon Leemon points out that the new Commodore 64 offers greater opportunities than the established Atari market. Craig signs a contract with COMPUTE! Books for two books, "All About the Commodore 64, Volumes One and Two." Volume One is a tutorial on the BASIC language. Craig submits the text for Volume One just before Scott Card leaves COMPUTE!. Scott Card goes on to write award-winning science fiction books as Orson Scott Card. |
| Fall, 1983 | Craig starts working on the assembly language portions of Sidplayer. Harry Bratt starts attending The University of Michigan and continues developing the original Sidplayer Editor in BASIC. The first Sidplayer song, "Peanuts" is created by fellow U of M student Steve Maggs using an early version of the Sidplayer Editor. |
| 1985 | The original Sidplayer is published as Part 3 of the book "All About the Commodore 64, Volume Two" by Craig Chamberlain, a COMPUTE! Books publication. |
| 1985 | The first Sidplayer songs are posted to the Delphi online service, in the MANiac section managed by Ellen Kaufman. I naively thought we would be able to number all of the Sidplayer songs. I was wrong. |
| 1986 | The Enhanced Sidplayer is published in the book "COMPUTE!'s Music System for the Commodore 128 & 64" by Craig Chamberlain, a COMPUTE! Books publication. It includes a new Sidplayer Editor written entirely in assembly language. |
| 1987? | Mark Dickenson publishes a method for soldering a second SID chip into the Commodore 64 for stereo sound. |
| early 1987 | Craig proposes the idea of a Sidplayer get-together at a meeting of the Commodore user group in Columbus, Ohio. |
| June 27, 1987 | The first SID-Fest is held in Columbus, Ohio. |
| 1988 | Kent Sullivan has the idea of making a cartridge containing a second SID chip, as an alternative to soldering the SID chip into the Commodore 64. Rick Washburne designs the circuit board, Kent coordinates the acquisition of the parts and the manufacturing, and the SID Symphony Stereo Cartridge is sold by Dr. Evil Laboratories. |
| 1988 | SID-Fests are held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Richmond, Virginia. |
| June 23-25, 1989 | A SID-Fest is held in New Orleans, Louisiana. |
| September, 1989 | Q-Link begins supporting The Music Connection which allows playing Sidplayer songs while the user is online. The last I heard, Q-Link had more than 5,000 Sidplayer songs available for download, consuming more than half of Q-Link's online storage. |
| November, 1989 | A SID-Fest is held in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. |
| 1990 | A SID-Fest is held in Las Vegas, Nevada. |
| 1991 | Dr. Evil Laboratories sells the rights to the SID Symphony stereo cartridge to Creative Micro Design. |
| June, 1991 | A SID-Fest is held in Miami, Florida. |
For a very interesting article about the design of the Commodore 64 and the SID chip, see "Design case history: the Commodore 64" in IEEE Spectrum, March, 1985.
The following is an excerpt from the article "Bach to The Future" by John Ryan, published in the April 1990 issue of RUN magazine. The full article listed the most popular music systems for the Commodore 64, and described the features and support of the Enhanced Sidplayer and the SID Symphony Stereo Cartridge.
| RUN magazine excerpt |
While looking through old files in preparing to create this web page, I discovered the following article that I wrote in 1988. It does a good job of explaining why Sidplayer became popular and how the Sid Editor worked.
| Sidplayer History and Promotional Information |
I have started writing a very personal account of the history of Sidplayer, including my background that led to being an author and creating Sidplayer, and will post it when it is completed.
Many years ago while preparing to move, I threw out all of my written development notes for Sidplayer including my bit mapping charts. Dick Thornton reverse engineered the .mus file format and published his findings in filestru2.txt. The document doesn't include the Enhanced Sidplayer additions, which support features like double sharps and double flats and a few more commands, and I'm not sure if bit 7 of note byte 1 (tie and duration) really is always 0.
Some day I will take the time to read the source code and re-construct the complete file format, but this is the best information I have at present.
| filestru2.txt |
To the best of my knowledge, the 6502 assembly language source files in the ZIP file below are the final versions used to assemble sid64.obj. Note that these source files contain conditional assembly directives to control whether the code is assembled for sid64.obj or incorporated into the editor program, and whether the target is the Commodore 64 or Commodore 128.
| source.zip |
revised July 23, 2005 10:20 EST