I've delved back into an old project of mine that I was working on before I was informed about the MIDI Box SID... A hardware SID synthesizer. I'm not doing this to compete with the imense and VERY powerful MIDI Box SID synth, but to take a little different approach to a SID device.
First; the MIDI Box SID to me is very cool, but it has become too complicated for me to make sounds on, especialy with the editor I made in SoundDiver (this is what I use and WANT to use... call me stubborn, I don't care
)... it simply has too many parameters to be intuitively programmed.Second; it is stereo (at least the SammichSID and MB 6582 is). I want a single SID hardware synth, that allow me to use a 6581 SID chip without strange stereo perspectives.
Third; I want a simple device that has just an Audio Out, MIDI I/O, Power switch, and a few LED's for signals... a very small and compact format meant to be controlled entirely by MIDI.
I decided to go from scratch, and build the whole thing on a wishboard from the bottom up... I decided on the PIC MCU (PIC18F452) that I know about from earlier, and by the time of this writing, everything has been set up and is working the way it should... SID is playing a steady sawtooth A4 tone, MIDI I/O is working great. Still afew hardware things is missing, but not that many.
Here is a picture of the "thing" as it stands right now... note that it's a SID 8580 I'm using at the moment (I have most of these to spare, should something go wrong)... also, the KORG Monotron in the picture is just used for it's speaker so that I don't have to blow my analog mixer input if something goes haywire (SID sounds cool through an MS20 analog lowpass filter by the way
):- SID_Project_3.jpg (226.02 KiB) Viewed 9045 times
):- SID_Project_4.jpg (160.03 KiB) Viewed 9045 times
That's about it for now... I'm working on this almost every day, and I'll post more comments to this thread along with project progression.
Peace.
