How Old-School Computers Played Sound Samples | MVG
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- čas přidán 7. 05. 2023
- The Commodore 64 8-bit home computer of the 80's was the world's most popular home computer. The sound chip known as the 6851 Sound Interface Device or SID would allow composers to create up to 3 voice music with four different waveforms per audio oscillator (sawtooth, triangle, pulse, noise). Out of the box It was not capable of playing Digitized Sound Samples. But by 1984 some games began to incorporate speech and digital samples. In this episode we take a closer look at the SID chip and how a bug allowed for regular PCM audio sample sounds to be easily played on the C64. This is a series where we explore digital sound on old school computers.
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#C64 #SID #DigiSounds - Hry
Modders and the demo scene have always found ways to pull off the impossible. Activision was in a league of their own back then too.
Good old times when Activision was the new guy fighting the evil empire Atari :D
I did a demoscene work that is 3 kilobytes
@@kaczan3 Also, back then, EA was decent company that supported new and innovative games.
Back in the day when I was actually excited for Activision or EA games.
You mean they found ways to pull off the impossible mission
To clarify, Impossible Mission and Ghostbusters used speech synthesis. This was done by a company called Electronic Speech Synthesis that specialised in digitising speech. That was a software-based approach. Other games such as Space Taxi used the "volume bug" method through location 54296. Space Taxi's programmer John F Kutcher actually created his own basic sampler hardware to record himself saying "Hey Taxi" and the pad numbers, then played the sample back at different speeds to give different pitches.
Later PCM sampling methods removed the problem of the samples sounding quiet. Turning off the screen display during playback was another tactic to improve the quality.
The company was called Electronic Speech _Systems._ And I don't know about _Ghostbusters_ but _Impossible Mission_ was definitely playing back a recording; According to a 2013 interview with designer Dennis Caswell, ESS happened to have someone working there who was able to give an appropriately Bond Villain-esque performance. Even if they _had_ used speech synthesis, the SID would still have had to be manipulated into playing back those real-time-generated samples.
Thank you for reminding me of Space Taxi. Loved that game!
@@stevethepocket the synthesis is based on a mathematical model of how speech sounds, not a direct sample. It's closer to the early example in the video where the SID is playing a tone rather than manipulating the volume register.
@@merman1974ESS recorded/digitized the owners voice (he had a recording studio in his basement) and then was able to identify redundant segments of the sample, keeping only one and replacing them with a reference to the one sample. This greatly reduced the size of the data and allowed games like Impossible Mission to have a lot of high-quality speech without loading new samples every time. Please see the research I did into the subject in the first link referenced in the description above.
Why did turning off the screen help? CPU cycles?
I used to love making SID music tracks, taking sheet music and converting them to SID files, adding lyrics and rudimentary ASCII art in the subtitle files.... About a decade ago I stumbled upon a website archive of a bunch of those old files, and I found some of my own creations in them that I had uploaded to local BBSes back in the day. That was a bit of a trip.
I used to be a C64 artist and I lost most of my artwork files over the years. I found that almost all of it had been uploaded to the internet and got it back. Incredible that those files have been preserved by uploading first to Compunet and other BBS in the 80s and then discovered on various floppy collections to be uploaded to the net.
@@stephenrobertson6025link?
Link?
@@HProtagVtuber Sounds like "High Voltage SID Collection" (hvsc in germany), no links since it just will be deleted by youtube.
RKO (remix kwed with an organisational domain) is an excellent source for remixes of sid tunes or Slayradio for a stream with a live show on Thursdays usually ( www.youtube.com/@slayradio )
BTW, the designer of the SID chip, Robert "Bob" Yannes, originally wanted to have 32 voices(!) but ran out of silicon space and time. Can you imagine? Bob went on to build the Ensoniq synthesizer and the company that makes it.
Yes. And it's also a shame that newer versions of SID aren't actually out anymore. 8580 had only cosmetic changes in filters and mixed waveforms, and they also messed up 4-bit sample effect known at 6581. For example, they could have put quite a new version with at least five full-stereo channels in the C64C or C128. That could really play awesome :-)
@@mnxnm Indeed it is a puzzle why Commodore has never upgraded any of their sound chips. Not the SID and not the Amiga's Paula chip during the lifetime of either machine line. A bit of a head scratcher as to why that is. They could have added voices, resolution (in the case of Paula), frequency, effects, etc. But for some reason they just rested on their laurels and the competition eventually caught up and (in some cases) surpassed them.
@@JustWasted3HoursHere Yes, it's really sad that the Amiga 4000 still used the sound system from the original Lorraine from 1983. I have the impression that the planned AAA chipset was supposed to have 8 16-bit stereo channels, but developers couldn't make it work properly even with backwards compatibility in mind, so the A1200 and A4000 models only have AGA, where Paula remained unchanged. The problem was clearly with the company management - they really needed a second Tramiel to drive the whip :)))
Also, it's an incredible shame that the C65 remained only in the prototype stage (now auctioned on ebay for millions of dollars). The only audio upgrade there was that instead of one sid there were two, and they called it Monster-SID. Stereo was modeled after the Amiga (one sid on the left, one on the right). Still, it would have been the best 8-bit ever, and even if it didn't sell as many as the C64, I'm sure it could have produced a number of beautiful games with bombastic 6-channel music, often accompanied by digital samples.
@@mnxnm Indeed, according to wikipedia, the next gen sound system with Hombre (the next graphics architecture that was going to be released after AGA) would have 16-bit resolution sound processor with twelve voices(!). Here's the full feature list from wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset
He run head first on Commodore's budget road blocks....
Impossible Mission and Ghostbusters were also mine, and I'm sure many others first experience of speech synthesis on the 64. Great explanation of the volume bug in the 6581
1980's Feature: "That's a bug!"
2020's Bug: "That's a feature!"
Or no it's the players who are wrong lol
Undocumented feature
After the 2018 discovery, you may be more right than you know. If it was a bug, why was the technique to play 8-bit samples discovered in the exact same volume register?
I played c64 Ghostbusters sooo much. That computer was my gateway to finding guitar.
It was under your computer?
@@DuckAlertBeats lol amazing, right?!
@@DoubleDguitar Yeah glad you found it!
I remember that Ghostbusters was so impressive that I invited friends of mine over to see it in action because they did not believe it. I remember distinctly four of my friends, all crouching behind me, the anticipation making time almost stand still. Everybody practically yelled out in disbelief when it came on, and they immediately said “make it do it again!” lol. ( We were in 4th grade and we knew just enough about the technical capabilities and limitations of the Apple II and the C64 etc that it was unbelievable to us! )
The C64 was an amazing machine & that turbo outrun intro music was just one of many awesome soundtracks that many games had.
never ceases to amaze me what old hardware can do, I love to hear about the how’s and why’s
This must be one of the best 8-bit computers ever made, the sound and graphics for the time was awesome. it's incredible that companies like Psytronik still release games to this day, like Outrage, Steel Ranger and Hessian just to mention a few.
Many decades ago, my family took me to a restaurant on an island which was far from the town.
Food was great and had arcades. I couldn't forget the game I played there that also had samples.
Many years ago, I rediscovered it with MAME.
It was Berzerk!!!
You forgot to mention speech synthesizers, which also appeared on the C64. In Poland we had such on the pirated BlackBox cartridge, where the Commodore was able to translate text into Polish speech in real time. It was super impressive at the time.
That’s insane for the time.
yup, and thats probably a dedicated video im going to do ! the difference is that they had additional hardware to make it work
@@ModernVintageGamer it was working on the stock C64. No additional hardware required. :) It would be cool to make a video about it!
It could sing too :]
S.A.M. - Software Automatic Mouth - could also do this, all in software on the C64 (and a couple other computers of the time). In 1982. There's now even a Javascript version of the software online, that can run in the browser and "speak". Unmistakable, sounds identical to the way it sounded on the 64 way back then.
I like how you show a picture of the later SID chip, complete with '8580' markings, and proceed to call it '8520' _twice_ as well as in the text overlay graphics. 🤪
This is so cool. I never knew that it was effectively a bug in the hardware that allowed this to happen. I really feel like I missed a lot of neat stuff never owning a C64 back when I was younger. My first machine was a 386 and while that did actually give me some decent options, I remember being jealous of the sid chip.
"The quality from the C64 is high enough quality to be hit with a Content ID claim". It's high praise indeed.
RIAA : SID chip scary
48KHz 8 Bit is possible
Please do more retrospectives on old systems (: these technical details are fascinating
The Commodore 64 was my first ever computer, then came the Amiga 500. These 2 computers made me the person I am today.
A ladyboy?
An retro gamer?
A nerd!
@@TheWeepingCorpse Only in your sick, twisted fantasies.
@@Layby2k cool
I had a friend back in the day that was a music composer, but with a massive love for chiptunes and the old video game soundtracks. He even worked on a documentary about video game music. He mentioned to me that the Commodore composers were really good because they had learned all these tricks to get the most sound out of the C64. And so when they went over to the later Amiga and its more powerful hardware, they applied all these tricks to get the amazing sounds out of the system many people love to this day.
Thank you for making a video that explains some of these tricks that these guys used back in the day.
I really do love me some SID music, and the C64 Demo scene, as it's amazing what these guys do with the hardware that's still in 2023 being pushed beyond limits people thought not possible.
Some of my favorite Demos off the top of my head are
Boogie Factor by Fairlight
We Are Demo by Noice, Offence, & Fairlight
Desert Dream by Chorus & Resource
Soild Legacy by Resouce
Edge of Disgrace by Booze Design
I could keep going on, and on listing off some amazing works, but that should get you started, if you have never watched any C64 Demos. Have fun going down the rabbit hole!!!
Hi MGV Carrion of Censor Design here. Great episode as always! And it's great to see one of my demos on your channel ;) Samples are really cool on C64.
The biggest demoscene party X in Netherlands is in a month from now and who knows what new cool demos it will bring. Cheers!
You can make a mod called digifix on the 8580 that basically reintroduces the click. It's involves soldering a resistor onto the board and is very easy to do. The music in Skate or Die is a good test case for it. It features some drums, which are totally silent on an unmoded 8580/board.
All I kept thinking about at the beginning of this video was “Impossible Mission” and they’re “Stay awhile….staaaay FOREVER!” It sounds so cheesy now adays but this was the equivalent of magic to us back then. So glad you included this game in your video!
I always remember taking a C64 game around to a friends house and saying "check out the speech" and you could barely hear anything. He had a C64C and I later found out that its SID (the 8580) was "fixed" and hence no digital sounds.
The main disadvantage of the master volume method is that it screwed up anything else you had playing on the SID voices. The other better method which wasn't covered I believe was to use the pulse waveform at a high frequency then vary the pulse-width register to control the duty cycle for PWM audio. Then use the low-pass filter on the voice to cut down the unwanted carrier noise.
Sounds like a couple of parallels to the PC Speaker tricks for sample playback!
With the PC Speaker, you can set the timer chip to output a constant voltage, then toggle the speaker-enable gate on and off for one method, which sounds terrible but is loud. The other involves using the timer's single-shot mode with varying countdowns to implement PWM, which sounds pretty good, but is also pretty quiet. If you want to hear the difference for yourself, grab a copy of Fast Tracker 2 and flip between them while playing a module.
There is another and even better method that doesn't require the low pass filter : at a chosen sampling rate (usually 7819 Hz / every 2 scanlines so you are not bothered by badlines) use the first half "ramp-up" side of the triangle waveform at a controlled frequency to reach a certain value and generate one sample. Playing with the voice "test bit" the SID will not output the triangle waveform but will hold the sample value at the moment the test bit is set. Also when test bit is set the oscillator phase value is reset to 0. So you do have control ! Therefore if at 7819 Hz you reset then set the test bit and output a new 8bits high frequency value (from your sample data table), you can play samples at ~7-8bits resolution (even though the DAC is technically 12bits). The reason why triangle is used and not sawtooth is simply because the sawtooth is "twice as slow" as the triangle in ramp-up phase, and it would not be able to reach full DAC volume.
@@laurent64 IIRC this was a great way to run digis because your filters still work perfectly and you can largely filter out your carrier for a cleaner sample as well as do other effects.
"V8, return to base immediately" is a digitised speech core memory for me even before "Ghostbusters! Ah ha ha ha ha"
Excellent episode!
I remember a time when I thought that the graphics in Way Of The Exploding Fist was basically arcade quality! Me and my friends played it (and Winter Games) until my friends C64 overheated and we had to take a break to let the poor 64 cool off and then 30 mins later, load the games (slowly from tape) again!
What really blew me away with the C64 though was the sound. Until this day I can enjoy listening to old classics like Parallax, Flimbos Quest and Comic Bakery.
Cool little trip down memory lane!
I remember playing Beach Head with my brother and laughing when you would shoot one of your own soldiers and he'd shout, "Hey, don't shoot me!"
But I also remember later in the C=64's life getting a microphone and programs that would actually let you record and playback short sound clips, and a program that would attempt to determine what note you were singing/whistling into the microphone -- I put the mic on the speaker of my electronic piano keyboard, and it was pretty consistent at telling what note I was playing, even if its guess was almost always a half-step wrong (e.g. it would display C# when I played a C).
MVG doing anything C64 is totally my cup of coffee
I remember being so envious and impressed, going round my friend's house and hearing the speech on Mission Impossible and Ghostbusters on his C64. It really was so incredible to hear actual voice at the time like that! Going back home to play the same games on my humble Spectrum 48K was a bit of a downer but still fun! Good days!
This is amazing. I had those games in the 80s and I never understood how it was possible or why I couldn’t replicate it
Awesome video. Blown away to discover that the speech was actually creators capitilising on a bug.
The Pokey chip used in Atari 8-bit computers was actually designed to play 4-bit sound samples, a feature rarely used though probably due to memory limitations and cpu time.
Yes, there was a small demo that played one sentence of a song - don't remember the name. It was synchronized with vertical retrace (15KHz).. was pretty nice.
It was few seconds of the song Self Control by Laura Branigan. czcams.com/video/RP0_8J7uxhs/video.html Demo: czcams.com/video/Lk2dY4G62-c/video.html
Anytime you talk about C64, it warms my nostalgic 💓. Thank you. So many great memories of the games, pirating, phone phreaking, and The Alliance and EaglesSoft here in the states. I was a teen, so statute of limitations has run out lol
Always the tech information I enjoy watching. Thanks for the video MVG
Fun fact: Martin Galway is actually not using drum samples in the Arkanoid introtune, but game data! ;-) He was basically given the finished game, code, leveldata etc and told to "search" for parts of it that sounded cool as a sample! 8)
Actually he ripped off digidrums martin has admitted this
This was a good episode.
And a nice explanation of how the bug works.
Also nice to see Mahoney's demo show up there.
Looking forward to the gameboy explaination.
Maybe also do nes? :-)
Shit. It has been 35 years since I was coding and I remembered exactly how to target $D418 to play samples and how to use it as a starting point to find music playing routines, music data and rip music from games....
Also it was possible to solder a potentiometer to ground on the later revisions of the SID chip to bring back the loudness of digitised samples (can't remember anymore which pin needed soldering though).
Gee I feel old now.. 😢
23 yo and wasnt able to get into gaming until recently when life got better. Love your content dude, especially the console hack stuff
Seeing this makes me even respect more what Matt Gray has created back then with the Last Ninja 2 soundtrack. Still love the Central Park track, simply outstanding.
...although it should be pointed out that none of these Galway tunes use samples! ;-)
Love seeing videos about the c64!! Thanks for being awesome MVG
Geez! This takes me back! Remember before sound cards in PC's? Same solution was used.
I remember being blown away by a "Pump up the Jam" digitization on the C64. Ghostbusters and Impossible mission were great examples that you included. Keep doing the great work you do, MVG
This video blew my mind. Thanks for going so in depth to explain the C64 SID bug!
I always wondered how they digitized audio to play on the C64... and now I know, a manipulated 'bug' in the SID chip, nice.
It still amazes me that the C64 scene is still very active ~40 years later (and I still have my C64 from the 80's).
Greets to all the past, and present C64 sceners and scene groups. :)
Demo Sceners and Demo Parties FTW.
I knew nothing about this and it was very cool to watch. Thanks for the great content as always!
This stuff continues to amaze me, how much fun is that!
This is fascinating. Honestly this type of video is why I come to this channel
I remember when i first launched Skate Or Die, it completely blew my mind.
Super nerdy and very enjoyable. Thanks so much for this!
The 8-Bit Guy mentioned that not even Commodore realized in the beginning how advanced the SID chip was. Truly impressed with the ammount of knowledge in this video C=
Thoroughly interesting! Thanks for covering such a unique subject!
The Journey arcade cabinet really did have a tape recorder inside it. It would play a few different Journey songs, depending on the level the player was on.
That turbo outrun music intro was amazing to me back then and still sounds cool now.
another great video as always, you really know your stuff when it comes to things like this
Awesome work! Thanks MVG!
The Vicious Sid Demos are amazing! They make the C64 sound like a mod playing Amiga,
in fact in that same demos actual amiga mod files are played from the the stock c64, I think at 8 bits / 11kHz in that case. even higher qualities have been achieved since.
This was a great explainer! On the Apple II there was a game called the Halley Project that had an amazing digitized audio intro. It was so clear and crisp it blew me away back in 85/86 .
Plasmania had a digital into too.
Reminds me of AVGN's "B17 Bomber" game from Mattel. You had to plug in a separate synth module.
I also recall Gauntlet and the NES port of Ghostbusters featured crude speech as well. Mindblowing for the era.
Your timing is insane with this video, I quite literally just finished Ahoy's excellent mini documentary about this. 👍🏻😎
I love John's Arcade youtube channel! Wish he'd come back as he's only made like one video in the past couple of years.
OK I understand what's happening here. I know you can't say anything because you're under NDA, but clearly you're working on a port of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom for the C64. Your secret is safe with us.
V8 - Return to the base immediately!
Thank you for this great video.
It brought back so many childhood memories.
Best regards : )
Very interesting! Fantastic video as always bud 👍
That's not a bug! It's an unintended feature! This makes me appreciate Jay Miner's team and their Pokey chip even more. Back in 1979, Jay 's team intentionally designed a sound chip with high pass filter in two of its channels allowing it to playback digitized samples (or cpu rendered)... something that became a standard in Paula.
:O I'm glad that youtube suggested to me your video. For a very long time I've been thinking that c64 had 3 regular audio channels (sine, square and triangle) and the 4th one for the digital samples. I can't believe how wrong I was ... Well, after 30 or so years I've finally learned something new.
Imagine how good those samples would sound if the volume was 8 bit?
I still remember how sad I was when I've switched from Amiga to PC with the pc-speaker. 2 bit sound was ... horrible.
Great Video As Always Man
Pretty cool. I used to love digis and collected them. Then I wrote Sample Monitor in SuperSnapshot so everyone could collect them :)
This was really great of how it was, even if could be possible.
Many years ago I interfaced an A to D chip to the user port and was able to sample sounds and then play them back with the volume trick. Wrote the program in assembly and counted instruction cycles to make the sample speed and playback speed match. It was crude but worked
That's cool, I did the same, with a serial ADC sold at RadioShack. I can't remember the model. I also used the paddle port with 4x slowed down music I made in a studio with a reel to reel at different IPS speeds, or a 45rpm record played at 331/3. Then I wrote Sample Monitor for SuperSnapshot.
This is something i dont think anyone else has done before. Thank you so much sir !
I have no idea why I watch all types of videos you do like this when I have zero idea what is going on. But I do find it very interesting even if I will never do this or know what you are doing. Very informative video as usual, MVG.
The ending is very impressive, I could have never dreamed of a 1Mhz computer with no external sound equipment being able to do that.
Great video! I liked how you used basic to help show what was going on, all the while wondering how you were going to get it to run fast enough to reproduce any speech.
I've never seen/heard the demo at 12:43 - that's pretty cool.
Nostalgia overload! You're discussing the most exciting and creative parts of my teenage years. Back then I made an 8 bit sampler on the C64 and 6581, I forget how I downsampled to 4 bit, either dividing or discarding the extra bits, either way it worked.
The C64 had a history with the elite musicians sharing the best music software among themselves, later these versions would be leaked, then the rest of us got a free upgrade. Of course they always had better software again.
Excellent work- Thank you❤
That was great & not a topic I'd ever even considered having any interest in. Thanks, MVG! =D
Awesome video man! It seems that the voice sample is been vocoded by the sid chip using the audio as the carrier to the amp envelope. I'd imagine that the filters will also be tweakable in the basic programmer creating different tones and types of voice. Modulation parameters in the code would also make some more realistic sounding voices.
I especially enjoyed using the speech window tool on the amiga workbench as this is essentially bending, shaping and expressing a synthesizer to create voices.
Love these videos! Thanks!
I had both those games as a kid and had both those games! Allegedly the amount of processing power it took to send so many commands to the SID chip was the reason why games "froze" whilst the audio sample played? The c64 Ghostbusters theme on its own was such a JAM for an early title. The tricks and "hacks" that composers came up with over the c64's life were incredible and have majorly fond memories of the Commando theme and the hugely improved Ghostbusters II theme. The SID chip was and still is an amazing piece of tech
Well done! Great video!
“Bond, James Bond” at the intro to 1985’s ‘A View To A Kill’ was my fist C64 speech experience
I remember having a small program on my C64 where you could enter lines and it would read them back to you. It would even raise the voice at the end of the sentence when you input a ! or ? And it raised it even more, the more ??? you wrote, leading to a lot of fun for us kids.
As always, excellent content with great explain and showcase
That took me back! Cheers, man!
Great video. A perfect example of "things I didn't know that I wanted to know"
I told Pex/Mahoney about your honourable mention 👍
Greay video mate ! Thanks so much
Soo Great Episode :D Love the retro music :D
MVG, I have no idea what’s happening here, but I always find your videos fascinating and very engaging. Awesome work!
Beyond Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple II had digitized speech. We always joked you could "hear the poke statement" as it played.
Thanks for explaining how sound samples was played on the C64.
I had the C64C for many years and loved ghost busters and hundreds of other games. The sound was great and the graphics was good, but i never appreciated it really, because i only played games on it. I tried basic, but didn´t get it at that time with age 6 to 8. I really miss that time, but after more than 30 years i dont remember much of it anymore unfortunatly :-(
Back in the 90s, I had an IBM 286 with only a bleeper as audio output and I remember there were a couple of games playing voice samples with kinda similar quality. Good old times! Great video!
I'm not surprised the SID chip could manage this. As a lad I was, however, amazed when I heard samples of the Three Stooges coming out of our PC squeaked in the Cinemaware game of the same name. Witchcraft!
Perfect level for me. Just technical enough but nothing over my head. Nice job.
This was incredible! I didn’t realize so much had do be done to generate audio back in the day. That’s crazy to think about how much coding had to be done back then. And now… we have unreal engine 5 that calculates light shading on the fly. Love this C64 content! ❤
Check out the 'Vicious SID' demos, which do a surprisingly good job of playing a 4 channel tracker mod, on a boggo standard C64.
First digitised audio I ever heard on a home computer was in the ZX Spectrum game 'Punchy'. Hearing 'That's the way to do it' coming out of the speccys in built mono speaker was like magic at the time!
This was impressive beck then and still is now! As always I appreciate the content
I remember running SAM (Software Automatic Mouth) on the Atari 800. It was quite amazing, in 1982. The Atari's sound hardware was more limited than the C64's (square waves only for synth sound), but it did have one extra channel (4), and most importantly, a PCM channel.
5 sound channels. 4 in Pokey, 1 in GTIA. And the Pokey can go into 2 channel 16 bit mode. And it can emulate the sound of the SID.
All four channels could be put into volume control mode for PCM.