Jaicen

Looks good, but it's not how i'd do it. I'd have the tape laid flat on cardboard, as you have. Over that, i'd lay a piece of card with a slot cut out of it. The card becomes your spacer. Then i'd find some conductive plastic, such as an antistatic bag you get IC's in. This needs to be glued to the cardboard under slight tension, to prevent it from sagging into the slot. Once the whole thing is constructed, it can be laminated for durability.

At the risk of repeating stuff already said, I thought i'd add my tuppence to this thread. I've actually just had the pleasure of working with a Juno 6, which posseses a damn fine arpeggiator if you ask me. I like that you can set it very fast to sound like a C64, which is cool, but not where i'm going with this necessarily! I actually wanted to talk about an epiphany I had. I plugged in my DR-110, to sync the arpeg to 16ths along with the beat. However, on some of the demo beats (C1 for example, DR owners ;) ), accent isn't applied every 16th note, rather it's a pattern. When I sync the arpeg to that, it produces some very very cool patterns. So, I was thinking that a stand alone arpeg could have a multiplier for MIDI tempo (1x, 2x etc), and also be programmable like the MBSID, so you can choose to have 'missing' 16ths, if that makes sense. That's pretty much all I wanted to say really. I'm off to design a discrete seq based on a PIC and a decade counter ;)

This is something i'd be interested in, but again, I'm unclear as to the logic behind using these chips. I assume it's because they provide a greater degree of accuracy, compared to the AOUT-LC??

Yep, it's a brilliantly thought out piece of kit. I might be tempted to build one, even though I can't speak German, it would be cool to make broken/nonsense sounds anyway ;)

Sounds like a plan, but i think that the Avr Is a little overpriced. I did consider buying one before I checked out the cost to build. Midibox is much better value ;)

Congratulations on getting this finished Rio. This is a really nice use for all these empty C64 cases, as well as a great way to control the Speakjet (i've always wondered about how that would work). Are you planning a port into English phonetics? If so, it's probably something that I'd build for sure. My German's a little rusty i'm afraid ;)

Good boy! Looks like i'll be saving up to build one of those too then ;)

Any chance we could have both piccies embedded into this thread? Might help the decision making process a little ;)

Just out of interest, have you tried an LM308 op-amp?? It's not particularly well suited for audio, but when it's driven rail to rail (as in this design), it has a nicely overdriven sound because its slew rate is so low. In practice, this means that it has frequency selective distortion which is very nice in my opinion. FWIW, the 308 is used in the old ProCo Rat guitar pedal, so chek that out for a taste of what it sounds like. My guess is a 303 through one of these would sound immense!

Or you could get diffuse LED's and sand the tops down level with the control surface. Pretty easy and effective if you ask me, though I prefer the oldskool look.

Ok, i'm in then! FWIW, I really liked the second version artwork with the white-on-black. I thought that was very cool, but I like the look of the original too, so ..whatever!

True, I hear you all the way there. I'm a sucker for conserving old stuff, but I think it would be really cool all the same.

So we're saying that the stereo option is the most useful? I'm still undecided how to arrange my SID's, because I have two 6581's (really good ones) and two 8580's. I may also get a pair of 6582's if i'm high enough on Wilba's list, but we shall see! So, with that in mind, and also bearing in mind that i'd like to run poly patches, what would be the best way to configure them? I should also mention i'll probably be driving it mostly from a GR-20 guitar synth, so a poly of 6 would be ideal (if I can get another 8580/6582 pair). In this case, it's a no brainer in that i'd have 4x stereo pairs, but assuming I have only 4 chips, how would I configure them to make the best use of what i've got?

I wondered where you'd been Slorrin, P64 is pretty quiet without you! Actually, it's quiet full stop! ;)

Anybody else think that's actually not a bad price for a silkscreened panel?? If we can go cheaper, i'm all for it but I could live with that to be honest.

I agree with Wilba, I hate to see good C64's trashed just for thier SID's. That pic of TK's showing all the boards he'd pulled makes me die a little inside every time I look at it ;) That's not to say I don't appreciate the mighty MBSID, because I see it as finally realising the true potential of the chip. It's now doing what it was designed to do, no longer handicapped by the hardware. The way I see it is, the older C64's with the 6581 will be less hard hit by the MBSID. I would never trash a C64 for chips, if I had to pull the SID, i'd hoard the motherboard just in case it was needed again. I look at that as my duty (and that's why there's a broken VIC-20 packed ready to move to my new house with all my other stuff ;) ). Whew, that was a bit long winded. I was actually posting to remind people that the CEM/SSM chips are not the be all and end all. Some great filters can be built with just a few common components like a CA3080 for example. Maybe we should look at that before buying up huge stocks of rare chips that really should be used for keeping old stuff alive. I think a lot of chips will be re-manufactured in the not too distant future, for example, I know that the Juno voice chips are being re-made, but they're not yet available.

If you could interface one of those vintage LED watches (made by commodore) that come up on ebay, and get that to show patch numbers, or menu values as you turn the encoder, you would be the king of everything in my view ;)

My suggestion would be to get the VCA/VCF combo chip. That way you can have proper ADSR on both and the SID bug won't be a problem. It also means that you can get the proper SID sound (sort of) from any SID, regardless of its filter properties. You could also look at getting a CEM3396, which is a waveshaper & VCA+VCF. Effectively a synth on a chip. If you could feed it a square wave from the SID, you could use the onboard waveshapers, or just use the filter and amp. May be a cheaper option.

Dammit!! That's exactly what I had planned to do, now you've beaten me to it! Actually, I couldn't find a cheap enough Datasetted, so i've been putting it off, you know how it goes ;) Really nice job!

Excellent, well sort of ;) I'll get them shipped to work then, are you going to contact us when they arrive and are ready to ship?

Wilba, I have two questions: 1: Have you started shipping stuff yet? If so, it could be a problem because i'm moving house this week! 2: Have all the extra PCB's been sold yet?

Even so, I think there's at least one person guaranteed to get some chips ;)

Hey Doc, forget the 626, get a 505. They're much cheaper, and you can add one of my custom pitch bend PCB's. They connect to a bend console, so you can tune each group of sounds up and down when connected, and when the bend console is removed, the pitch will be standard. Very cool, and very useful, especially when bending the hell out of it! I do second your Matrix/Cheetah call though, I want one of those too ;)

If we can get different colours, i'm in, I'd want a red and black one if at all possible.

No laughing at at the SH-201, that's a tasty VA keyboard, especially if you edit via a PC. I think if it was a little cheaper, you'd see a lot more of them. Not to mention the fact that I have a fetish for Roland stuff ;) My personal fave is the Roland GR-20 because i'm a spaz with keyboards ;) But I also have a JX-3p which is my favourite real synth.