VIC-20 MIDI Interface and Synth Cartridge Prototype

The VIC-20 was my first computer. You can imagine how close and personal I am with the thing. I do feel that its been unjustly historically overshadowed by the computer that followed it, especially in the audio/music scene.

Viznut and PwP's Robotic Liberation was a real blast and it probably revitalized the scene a bit.

But what we need is a musician friendly way to tackle the beast!
Three years or so ago I requested the help of François Leveillé (aka eslapion) on the Denial forum, a VERY nice electronics guru to help me construct a VIC MIDI Interface like the one HERE . So that I could concentrate on making the 6502 assembly code to read the input MIDI then drive the VIC-I chip. I got the prototype from eslapion, had the core MIDI read code done, but got side tracked by the VIC-I emu in chipsounds and figured I would pursue the project a bit later... that was two years ago.

Early this year Leif Bloomquist wanted to do a similar project, so I just lend him Francois's proto and my preliminary MIDI reading code and hes done VERY WELL with it See and hear it HERE

This is really a prototype, but I believe it is going to transform itself into something that any 8bit musician will not want to miss!

Congrats to Leif for pulling it off! I want serial #00001 ok?

New screenshots on official site

Its getting VERY VERY close to shipping now.
I just build release candidate 1 with the first bunch of presets.

New screen shots and a new "preset-show-off" excuse for a track from myself on

the official chipsounds page

Kudos to my testers

Hi

We are quite lucky to have some of you testing this thing.
You know who you are and you will be credited :)

Thanks again!

chipsounds on TV

Just prepping to relax and to watch a tv show whose music (by Éric Patenaude of Plogue), contains quite a few blips from your favorite in-dev synth :)

Listen to the intro and spot the blips!

LINK

Et Félicitations encore à toi Éric!

The kind of screenshot I fancy

I rechecked my DMG waveform synthesis yesterday, and made sure I had the range and AC Coupling emulation right according to the lowest 32Hz freq of the DMG Wave Channel.
(i dont have a pro mod DMG, I personnaly like the sound of the phones out of mine)

EDIT: For fairness to the scientific community, here are the actual samples.
1)chipsounds
2)DMG phone out

Slight tonal difference, but as herr_prof mentionned it can sound different from DMG to DMG.

More: Spectrum of DMG:


More: Spectrum of chipsounds:


You can save the files and animate them, as you will see the real DMG has some broadband noise at -90db, while chipsounds is pretty flat. Should i add extra noise samples to mix in? I seriously thought about adding them as extras

No fancy research, just preset making

But presets can take a while, there's just so much messing around associated with the task.

This is one of my favorite SID style arps

Testing the Wave Sequencer module

Paul Slocum's amazing ATARI synthcart beats remixed in chipsounds...

(just random pitchbend/mod wheel action on the first loop)