reSID
More info
- Creator
- Dag Lem
- Released
- 1998
- Type
- Emulation library
- License
- GPL
Dag Lem's software model of the C64's SID chip — accurate enough to mimic even the grubby analogue stages that made the original so hard to copy.
The difficulty was that the chip sounded bad in exactly the right ways: three oscillators, a filter built from analogue parts that drifted between individual chips, and a leaky resonance that software long reproduced as clean maths. Dag Lem instead attacked the circuit at the gate level and resampled the filter against a real 6581, making reSID the first model that sounded like the original rather than like an idea of it.
Written in C++ and folded into the VICE emulator around 1998, it became the default engine in sidplay and countless other players. Anyone listening to an HVSC file on a modern machine is most likely hearing reSID do the counting.