10 Jul
2014
10 Jul
'14
5:46 p.m.
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=84…
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!