SIDPlay
More info
- Creator
- Michael Schwendt
- Type
- SID player and emulator
- Platform
- Cross-platform
- License
- GPL
The player that makes the Commodore 64's SID music listenable on modern machines by emulating the whole sound chip.
SIDPlay, first written by Michael Schwendt in the 1990s, plays .sid files — Commodore 64 music — by emulating the 6510 CPU and the SID chip that produced the sound. Because SID tunes are really tiny 6502 programs rather than sampled audio, you can't just decode them; you have to run them.
The libsidplay engine (and its successor libsidplayfp) became the standard back-end, powering the High Voltage SID Collection and countless players. It is the reason 1980s C64 chiptunes still play, note-perfect, decades after the hardware fell silent.