[LAU] Sound Chip as a synthesizer on Linux. Thoughts, ideas?

[Fede]

>What the OPL3 produces cannot be any different than what an
> effective emulation of it can produce.

Not so sure. Comparisons I've heard between hardware and software emulation and while it's subjective to state which sounds best, they are obviously very different.
And besides the timbre perspective, it's nice to have a hardware device to offload the CPU. My unexperienced intuition tells me it's more reliable.

> On the other hand, SID's synthesis is analog, ...
>But the SID is much harder to emulate accurately than those, and
> an external box would really be desirable (if one doesn't find a way to
> just network a C64 to do it, which may be cheaper).

This is cool: http://www.linusakesson.net/hardware/rasp64/index.php

> By "hobbyist" I mean "hand made one at a time by hobbyists", as opposed to
> "mass produced in Chinese factories". It's certainly not a judgment on
> their quality or the art that one may produce with them. 

Yeah, I kind of dislike the term hobby myself. Maybe because I'm a spanish speaker we imported the word with a slightly different meaning. No offense intended.

>I still have a
> Commodore 64 myself

Cool!

>and while I'm more than happy enough with emulation of
> its sound for the most part, I do recognize that analog synthesis does have
> qualities that
> simulations of it don't... and vice versa.



> At any rate, speaking of the hardware SID specifically, what you're looking
> for is definitely possible... the hardware may still be available:
> 
> http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=842&currency=USD
> 
> but the Linux driver site seems to have disappeared in the last year:
> 
> http://web.archive.org/web/20130812052953/http://llg.cubic.org/cw/

Very interesting, though probably out of my reach (economically and geographically).

Thanks!