Elektron Musical Instruments

On Sat, 11 Dec 1999, andrew sargeant wrote:

> afaik, the motorola is responsible for updating the SID at 200 times
> per/sec ..
> that lil old chip needs to be forced to do that right? since the c64 was
> 1mhz..

The SID-chip is still running at 1Mhz. We're using latches together with a
PAL to control the programming of the SID-chip which is appearently
running at a different speed than the main processor. The extra power of
the HC11 allows us to run a complex synthesis engine which is updating
the SID-chip up to 200 per second, updating the user interface, and
handling MIDI at full speed.

There is no problem updating a SID-chip many times a second, even on a
C64. The problem is updating the synthesis engine which is quite complex,
running for instance four nifty LFO's and tons of software
counters/envelopes.

> but what else could it do? .. will the future OS offer more ways (within
> software)
> to manipulate the SID?

Actually the CPU is pretty much stretched to it's limit as it is. You can
notice this when setting the update speed to 200, and enter the main
screen where the SID-logo is scrolling in. It will be rather slow. :) At
least you can see I've made a decent process scheduling as the responce
time never is slowed down - just the user interface.

> Also -- sample playback.. any chance of sending sounds to it via midi?

Could be done... Just a matter of taking the time to do it. Would be cool!

   __
__///Daniel Hansson           |   SidStation - MOS6581 Synthesis
\XX/ daniel@...   |         www.sidstation.com