If you find a sidtune which does not play, you might have encountered
If you happen to encounter a bug or anything unexpected, contact the author(s). It is very unlikely that the maintainer of a sidtune collection releases non-working tunes. So if you definitely can't get a song to work, try asking the individual maintainer of that collection for verification first. But don't forget to provide at least this information
I have noticed a difference between the latest and a previous version. Is it a bug?
If you care, please submit a report according to what is written in section 2.2. It is appreciated that you try to be as precise as possible upon describing what you think might be wrong.
The latest and best maintained sidtune collection on the Internet is the
High Voltage SID Collection. It can be found on the World Wide Web.
Related information is located at the same site:
The High Voltage SID Collection
http://www.dhp.com/~shark/c64music/
You can choose between download of individual sidtunes, automated updates
to the collection and always the latest complete collection. Additionally
you can use a search engine to look up individual sids.
You can't. Only the DOS version was written in ASM. The source hasn't been published, and it won't be published either because the code is outdated. With appropriate 32-bit programming tools it should be much easier to use the existing emulator engine.
Although the SIDPLAY emulator engine is not designed and optimized for usage in demos, intros and similar, it is possible to use its platform independent code. A 32-bit C++ compiler, soundcard drivers and maybe a few portability adjustments are needed.
Check the links section on the SIDPLAY home page. There is at least one emulator related home page linked that explains how to process C64 files and where to get the necessary software and hardware.
Since you ask this question you most certainly don't know 6502 machine code programming.
There is a sidtune player for the real C64 available. It is compatible to the PlaySID
one-file format. Else it has nothing much in common with SIDPLAY.
The Digital Dungeon
ftp://utopia.hacktic.nl/pub/c64/Music/SidPlay/
If you want special features and improvement in certain parts of the emulator, please think about supporting the authors. We do appreciate any kind of sponsoring or donations, whether it is free hardware, software or money. Please contact us.
Volunteers of any kind - whether programmers, developers, electronic engineers, C64 musicians or team workers - who would be interested in a next generation SID emulator are hereby invited to think about a possible joint venture. There are many ideas and emulation approaches to discuss. If you would like to start your own project I would be happy to support you.
Notice, you don't need to. In case of sidtunes that consist of more than one file, any format conversion is optional. As modern SID music collections come in one-file format only, this question might as well be removed from this FAQ.
On the contrary, there are still old sidtune packages on the Internet. Such packages may contain files in any of the formats described in section 5.2. The file naming might be very unusual. And as there is no way to detect plain C64 data files, an unknown file might as well contain text or graphics, but just no music data.
By default, but depending on the particular player front end, SIDPLAY searches your directory for the following possible file name extensions and tries to match a pair of files if the specified file is not in one-file format. This list may change at any time:
Experienced users of SIDPLAY may want to do optional conversion when working on sidtunes. For instance, if you would like to change the song info or modify the ripped data. This may either be done from inside the player front end or with external utilities.
Q: When I downloaded the song archives, I found out that I can't extract the .INF files from the .LHA files. Apparently, when I use DOS to extract them, LHA can't handle the fact that the files have a four character extension .INFO. How can I get the info files out of the LHA files?
A: Use LHA x -a -m2 to extract the files from the LHA archives. When the extraction is complete you don't need to convert any files for use with SIDPLAY. But before proceeding, make sure what types of files the archive contained. This is necessary to successfully complete the following probably required renaming procedure:
With MS-DOS always use LHA x -a -m2 to extract the files from the LHA archives. While option -a allows files with any attributes to be extracted, option -m2 enables renaming of double filenames. Double filenames are caused by LHA, cutting long filenames from the AmigaDOS file-system to the limited length of the (MS-)DOS file-system.
When the extraction is complete you find a lot of files named psid.* in each directory. In some newer packages the filename is simply the name of the tune. Caution. A few files are read only or even hidden. You will have to manually change their file attribute to be able to see them. The main job will be to rename the files, so that SIDPLAY is able to find and list them. Adding a support file extension to each file should usually be enough.
For some operating systems there are small helper utilities which are capable of renaming sidtune files automatically. 4DOS users may like to make use of the Psid EXtracting utility. The script and its documentation are available on most C64 emulation FTP servers.