HardSID

The HardSID is a family of sound cards, produced by a Hungarian company Hard Software and originally conceived by Teli Sándor.

The HardSID cards are based on the MOS Technology SID (Sound Interface Device) chip which was popularised and immortalized by the Commodore 64 home computer. It was the third non-Commodore SID-based device to enter market (the first was the SID Symphony from Creative Micro Designs and the second was the SidStation MIDI synthesiser, by Elektron). HardSID's major advantage over SidStation (apart from the fact that the SidStation has been sold out long since, with only few used pieces surfacing now and then) is that it is a simple hardware interface to a SID chip, making it far more suitable for emulator use, SID music players and even direct programming - SidStation only responds to MIDI information and requires music events to be converted to MIDI and back.

The original HardSID (1999) was a card for the ISA bus (instantaneously anachronizing the item), containing a slot for one SID chip. From the beginning, HardSID has supported both the 6581 and the 8580 models of SID, including all revisions.

The ISA model was subsequently replaced with a version for the PCI bus. As well as a standard 1-SID version, they launched the HardSID Quattro, which includes slots for four SID chips and a cooling fan.

Two new models have been developed: the HardSID 4U, a USB device with sockets for 4 SID chips and the HardSID 4U Studio Edition with improved electrical isolation and screening to reduce noise in the signal. The units are expected to ship from April 2008.

HardSID cards are supported by most modern SID music playing applications, including sidplay and ACID64 Player and some trackers such as GoatTracker. The ISA cards have official drivers for Microsoft Windows, and the PCI ones for Mac OS X as well as Windows. Unofficial drivers are available for Linux. Little information is yet available for the compatibility of the HardSID 4U, but it will ship with a Vista compatible driver and can be controlled via a VSTi interface.

Separate MIDI drivers, which allowed any MIDI-capable instrument or sequencer program to drive the card, were available for both the ISA and PCI versions of the HardSID.

The HardSID 4U unit has dedicated on-board CPU power, as opposed to the earlier HardSID units.This makes the 4U able to play SID-files with digi-contents at full speed and quality, without eating up your computer's CPU power. The older revisions depended on the player software's emulation to accomplish this, due to the lack of an on-board CPU or memory buffer. The result was virtually always a *very* high CPU load when playing digi-tunes.

External links

* [http://www.hardsid.com The Official HardSID home page]
* [http://hardsid.sourceforge.net HardSID Linux driver]
* [http://sidplay2.sourceforge.net HardSID support for sidplay 2.x]
* [http://sourceforge.net/projects/sidplay2 Simon White's SID Player Music Library V2] - includes sidgroups a SID voice selection program
* [http://www.gsldata.se/c64/spw/ sidplay2/w] - Cycle exact emulation by Simon White with support for HardSID; user interface by Adam Lorentzon
* [http://www.acid64.com ACID64 Player] - An extremely accurate SID player with full HardSID/Catweasel support by Wilfred Bos