m00dawg

My thoughts exactly! In fact, I did that already with the 7805 and I *thought* I got it to its unshorted glory but I think I was testing the wrong pins (doh!). I think I'll just desolder the whole mess, clean it, check for shorts, and then try again. I've got a lot of solder on the 7805 pins and I may have even scratched into the ground plane while trying to desolder (before I found out my solder sucker was busted). I doubt that will be a problem but it means the underside of my board is no longer pristine :P Good thing no one sees that side I suppose...

Actually I have a braid but it didn't seem to do the trick. It goes some of the stuff but not near enough. I've had really good luck with my solder sucker. I've also been told that adding a small notch to the side of the sucker really helps since you can put your iron through the notch. I haven't tried that yet but plan on doing so when I get the new sucker, probably by sometime today.

Grey/Black. It's a tube of Arctic Silver 3 I've had for ages. Seemed to be probably more than necessary for this project, but it saved me from having to go out and pick some up :)

So my build was going perfect (everything is straight, flush against the board, and purty!) until I started on the regulator section. I think I may have made a mistake in using conducting heatsinking compound. When I hooked the regulators up, I ended up having a short with the GND and +5V pins of the 7805. I looked at other parts of the board and didn't see anything of not. I also looked, of course, heavily at the heatsink section for any compound that might be touching +5V. I didn't see any but I thought I would check to see if anyone had similar issues and had a suggestion with where to start? My plan is to remove the 7805 (once I get another solder-sucker, goddamn your shitty blue ones, Radio Shack!!) to see if the short still exists. I'm going to replace the 7805 just in case it was the regulator. Then I was going to look at shorts where there is a +5V and GND pin close to each other. Any other thoughts?

Perhaps, but the idea that one can eat silicon and shit SIDs, though you deny such claims, is intriguing :)

Haha yeah that's me, guilty as charged. These were videos from my local hardware group I go to. People tend to do a lot of things PIC there. Anything from a ice-chest robot which sends you drinks, to a Holiday lights display (that's from the guy filming the video - 10k lights this year!). The robot guy (Fredrick) even built the PIC-based demo that won some demoscene contest a year or so ago. I apologize for the audio and dim LEDs. I used 1k resistors and I think I should have used 440 or something along those lines. They work well for me when I'm using the MB-6582 but they could be brighter. Pretty good stuff, though I was likely going to make a better demo but have been focusing on the sammichSID for now since it's easier to build and a bit more portable. That gives me time to add polish to my MB-6852. It's almost done save for the wiring issues I keep having with the control surface, but I've been pondering ripping all that out and starting over. Charles (again the guy filming) found really nice cabling I may use that's extremely bendable and even a bit stretchy. Chances are you might see another one of these videos when I finish the sammichSID assuming people are interested in that at the local meetup. I guess that was my 15 minutes of forum fame :) @Wilba: Say what you want but I still think it's some sort of magic how you managed to find all these SIDs. But I'm not complaining :) The 6582's in particular are absolutely fantastic!

Too add to that, if you can build a box and install dials and knobs, you can build the hardware. Most of the items you need come in kits. In fact, I find building the hardware is the easy part. The hard part, at least for me, IS the box :)

Yo Wilba, I wouldn't mind a shirt. How much are they?

Unregulated power might be an option for some, but I am supplying power using an external PSU that feeds the MB-6582 9V and 5V. The great thing about this is that all the heat from the regulation is external to the case and I have more room to use things like power resistors, etc. The PSU is still a work in progress, but works quite well. The only downside is that I am limited in my fan choice, although it looks like the fan from Mouser will perfect! Thanks for the help!

Because of the way I am powering my MB-6852, I wanted to supply 5V to the 40mm case fan in the MB-6582. Just to have something, I bought a cheap RadioShack 40mm fan and it works well - once it gets going. 5V is not enough to get the fan to start spinning (I have to help it), but once it's going it works well. My question is - does anyone have any recommendations for a 40mm fan that will run at 5V? I looked on Performance-PCs.com (the site Wilba recommends from the wiki) and did find quite a few 40mm fans, but none that were rated for 5V. Yes, I could use the 9V supply but I'd rather not since these power the SIDs analog parts and I don't want to introduce any noise by the fan if at all possible. Thoughts?

Hi Wilba! I noticed that you are using curved tracks in places on the board. The last place I saw curvy tracks was on the power-board of an arcade monitoring (the infamous K4600 for the arcade enthusiasts out there). Is there a particular reason you opted for curvy tracks? Where do these make sense? I ask because I wondered whether or not I should do that on my power board for my MB-6582 (when I finally get the board printed anyway). The sammichSID looks *good* by the way! I was a bit skeptical of the lack of a translucent top but, I'll admit, I think the results are indeed much better with the matte.

Wilba no longer sells SIDs directly as far as I am aware, but he is selling 6582A's as an option with sammichSID: It's an awesome compact MB-SID design and while I have not gotten my hands on it, for a basic MB-SID with a few bells and whistles, it seems like it will be quite awesome. And it should be easier to build than an MB-6582 or really any other MB-SID design since it's in a fairly easy to assemble kit style design. I don't know if it's too late to get added to the order list but I'm sure the answer to that is somewhere in the forum post. Either way, good luck with your SID hunting! Hope you find some!

Kinda defeats the purpose though don't you think? Sounds like you might be better off with an MB-6582, optionally with your own control surface? Wilba designed the sammichSID as a no-frills, easy to build synth in a small package. As a result, though I could be wrong, I don't think it's expandable.

When using a pair of headphones, I do find that the passive output is a bit quiet but seems to work just fine when I run it through an amplifier (such as one for my computer speakers). It's definitely softer than the individual outputs but good enough for most purposes I would say. For me, my plan is to use the passive output for my normal music makins and then to use the main outputs from each SID when I'm at the mastering stage. That is largely because I don't have the capability to give the MB-6582 4 discrete stereo inputs. At least not yet :P I would say if you are at the point of adding op-amps, you might want to just build your own external mixer or even buy one. Seems like that would be a fairly involve job trying to do it inside the MB-6582.

Yeah, unfortunately either buying the real deal or busting out a Hackintosh is the only way. Kinda sad that there isn't a decent player for the Winders folk. Linux has various options but none of them are able to output SIDs to the MIDI Sidstation format that I'm aware of. So OS X it is for now, but I don't think you'll be disappointed :)

So I've been using TK's patched SIDPlay for a few days now and thought I would share my findings. In short, it's freaking amazing! You have got to get this thing and start jamming out with it and your MB-SID! In long, the implementation of the MIDI output is brilliant. ASID XP was flaky, even on simply things like context switches. It also was unable to play certain SIDs or would just refuse to play anything if I loaded certain SIDs in a certain order (such as the Metal Warrior SIDs). The patched SIDPlay, by contrast, has only crashed on me once, and that was due to a SIDPlay bug directly it seems (it crashed on making a smart playlist). I have had to restart SIDPlay but only on rare occasions. I would have to restart ASID XP almost constantly. It also has played pretty much every SID I have asked with generally extremely good output to the MB-SID. You tack on this solid implementation to SIDPlay itself and end up with what I think is the best computer SID playing software. Again, fantastically epic job TK!

Nevermind - I just noticed that the tracks are there for the SmashTV version of the MB-6852 mainboard (which I have) but not on the original V1 prototype board.

On the main wiki page for the MB-6582 (http://www.midibox.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=wilba_mb_6582&s[]=mb&s[]=6582) it says I need to solder some wires in order for the passive headphone output to work. But in looking at the schematics and the board, I see tracks running after each resistor to the next resistor and to the headphone jack header. So I'm a bit confused :) Do I need to solder wires then and if so, where exactly?

I thought the chips were pre-tinned such that, at least if you're soldering it down for the first time, you really don't need to use any more solder? Either way, from what I understand, taping the chip down is a very common, and useful, procedure :)

I thought I'd mention in case you were not aware, but you could drop in SwinSID (http://www.swinkels.tvtom.pl/swinsid/) into those C64's so that they can at least make noise. Of course, SwinSID can do a whole lot more than just server as a replacement SID but it could nonetheless be used in this capacity and might raise the resell value of those C64's.

:o Dude and it's even in sync with the emulated SID output. That's absolutely fantastic TK! You just saved me a TON of work! Thank you very much! I hope you enjoy the beer! My hardware meetup folks too will really appreciate it as well! There's quite a few C64 enthusiasts that have been waiting months for me to finish my MB-6852 so I could show it. Thanks again!

Haha is there any need to be discrete? SidPlay is GPL'd so you could just fork it and make SidPlay++ or like SidTKPlay or something :) I agree, the player itself is fantastic - having the ability to play SIDs through the MB-SID would be icing on top since I have noticed that, while it's really close, it's still not 100% accurate to my ears when simply emulating the SID. I'm sure filter choice, SID revision, etc. has a lot to do with that though. Either way, I would love to "beta test" your internal project should you need any additional testers :)

Correct although, to be fair, I know I owe Wilba a beer for all his work with the MB-6852 and now sammichSID :)