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works for me Goattracker 2.70 standard version (actually stereo version too but of course its of little use since only the first 3 tracks work) @ Intel E8400 Windows Vista Business 64-bit M-Audio delta audiophile

Just wanted to say THANK YOU! The kit was a breeze to assemble. The only trouble I had was when I forgot the jumpers for the Midi in/out, a mistake that didn't take long to realize. Guess I was eager to start playing with it. :rolleyes: Still haven't quite figured out what the F2 and F3 keys do :) Thought I might as well share two pictures of it with some other of my toys. Sammich! Including, imho, pretty nice 2 min paintjob Oombox 6581 (MBSID) GameBoy DMG with added back-lighting and noise free stereo jack Novation Remote keyboard

sorry, i was out of town this weekend here is the link: http://www.webhallen.com/prod.php?id=87211&traff=1 thats pretty much as cheap as it gets :) But its pretty thick and has a high viscosity and its non-conductive so it should do the trick. And I can't really imagine any paste not working if applied correctly. :rolleyes:

If you live in Sweden it shouldn't be a big problem. Places like clas ohlson, elfa and kjell&company have what you need. I got this power suply from kjell&co, i haven't tested it with the sammich yet (not finalized my build yet) but it should do the trick: http://www.kjell.com/content/templates/shop_main_details.aspx?item=44253 (Stabilized 12VDC @ 1000mA) I got the non-conductive thermal paste from webhallen but you could get it from pretty much anywhere.

What you need besides the kit is a power supply and some non-conductive non-fancy thermal paste for the heatsinks. Something that believe it or not, some people seem to have problems finding.

I've used MIDIYoke (with Miditrix) under Vista x64. Can't really help you with setting it up since I've had no problems. It just worked "out of the box." If you can, I'd go for a proper midi hardware solution. In my experience most MIDI <-> USB cables only create a bunch of problems.

very nifty little proggie will come in handy :thumbsup:

Nice to see em' being shipped. Hopefully enough people mysteriously disappear so I can get into batch #4. :rolleyes: Btw, I took the liberty to fix the link to the build guide in the wiki.

I'm happy as long as everyone (read me) can haz sammich :D

I bought it from a Polish company called artronic on Ebay. Got it supercheap! Only thing with it is that the symbol "|" shows up as "12". It may be possible to change the charset somehow but I haven't looked into it since it really doesn't bother me. Here is the datasheet: http://www.artronic.pl/o_produkcie.php?id=651?

Thanks for your kind words, and thanks for making it mbotw! Sadly I haven't got much time to play with it at the moment but every time I do I get this big smile on my face. :)

Day 5+ ;) My stuff on a carboard box has transformed into a fully working midibox. I call it the OOMbox 6581, my nickname is Oomiz. The sound is amazing! I tried feeding it the sidtune Rampert! It's one that pretty much tests every aspect of the sid-chip and I must have won the sid-lottery since my 6581 does exactly what it is supposed to. Anyway since I've written this thread to get help but also help others I want to give you newcomers a hint when connecting the DINX module. On the PCBs from smashtv, on the 10 header connectors, J3-J6, only the 10th pin is ground. NOT the 9th. This may be obvious for most people but I fooled myself and wasted quite some time figuring out why my buttons didn't work. About the buttons in my case, they are custom made by me since I couldn't find nice 1cm diameter buttons that are a bit soft but still tactile. I had a large bag of really long (20mm shaft) 6x6mm tactile switches so what I did was that I cut those short. Not something that I recommend, getting them equally long is tedious. Then I wired them up on a perfboard and put a device fot (the soft pads you put under stuff) in every hole of the fronpanel. Since the bottom of the pads are a bit larger than the hole they stay in the holes without actually attaching them with glue or anything to the switch shafts. The entire thing is built into a pac-tec KEU-10. It's more or less ready and has two banksticks, A0 for patches and A7 for ensembles. All I have to do now is figure out what I need a midibox for, I'm not a musician, but it sure was fun building it. Last step would probably be to paint the case, Oh and I might want to find a prettier encoder knob ;) Thanks to everyone helping out!

I use ASIDXP with my 6581. No samples are played. Also, ASIDXP only plays PSID files and not RSID files. (Both can have .sid as fileformat name)

Another option would be to just use Ati tray tools instead of CCC. (It's the same program that is installed with the omega drivers.)

I'm running it successfully under Vista 64-bit using MIDI Yoke and MIDItrix for routing.

Day 5. Let there be sound. After spending last night trying to figure out why my midi-connection was acting up I woke up really tired. I never got around testing the SID-module last night so today was a big day. A quick breakfast and then it was time to hook the SID-module back up and give it a go: And the result? It sounds just beautiful! I'm really happy I took the time needed to build the optimized version of the PSU. There really isn't much noise at all. At least I cant hear any with my current speaker setup. I've included a short clip (approx 40 seconds) of my Midibox playing the great demotune Axis of Evil by Zabutom if anyone is interested in how my 6581 sounds. I still need to do more testing to find out the characteristics of my 6581 to see what it can and what it can't do. This is a major milestone for me. Next up will be editing the .asm so my LCD uses 4x20. After that it's time to start thinking about control surfaces and enclosures. I've done a lot of planning but after building the modules I may have to rethink some of my design choices for the enclosure. I also included a picture of what it looks like now. The 14V wire is connected with crocodile clips and it's all mounted on a cardboard sheet from a box of beer cans, but it's starting to look like a Midibox. :) test2.mp3 test2.mp3

I posted it here too since it would be of interest to people using MIOS Studio. I doubt that they all read my midibox building thread. I really don't see anything wrong with that. But you are right it doesn't mean that it will work on every single computer in the world running Vista 64-bit.

I'm running MIOS Studio in 64-bit Vista, It's working without problems. As stryd_one pointed out it doesn't mean that it will work for anyone else. But there is hope for us monkeys.

Testing shows that this may in fact be a case of bad wiring. I will redo my wiring to the MIDI jacks. *edit* It turns out it was a bad MIDI-jack. HUGE thanks to SmashTV and Nils for helping me out, you guys rock! *edit2* Btw while doing all the testing I switched between windows and linux just to rule out any OS settings, and I can now confirm what I have suspected all the time: MIOS Studio works flawlessly in 64-bit Vista.

Ok I've figured out how I messed up. I've not been able to solve it yet but I'm working on it. All help is appreciated. For some goodforsaken stupid reason my cheap USB->MIDI connector has the MIDI-OUT and MIDI-IN mixed. All other devices I've ever used have had MIDI OUT on PC connects to MIDI IN on another device, MIDI IN on PC connects to MIDI OUT on another device. Now I don't know if they just invented their own "lets mix the cables standard" or if someone accidentally mixed the connectors while assembling it but it has gotten me into deep problems. Anyway the problem is that I tried uploading the sid-application while the connections were crossed. This somehow has corrupted MIOS. I've now switched the cables and now I get "F0 00 00 7E 40 00 01 F7" every two seconds. This means that the bootloader still is alive and that there is hope! I dont have a pic-burner so thats really good news. The problem now is that when I try to upload MIOS I get: Starting upload of mios_v1_9f_pic18f4685.hex Hex file contains code in MIOS range, forcing reboot! Received Upload Request Sending block 00000400-000004FF Error: Received unexpected Upload Request After 16 times MIOS gives up just as it's supposed to. Now you can go ahead and call me noob and tell me to RTFM but I really can't figure out how to get MIOS back in. I can't think clearly. It's time for a cup of coffee to clear my mind but if someone who has a clue should read this. Do NOT hesitate to give me some directions. :)

Day 4. I finally got everything hooked up. Sent some funny messages to the LCD through the debug interface in MIOS Studio. Then it was time to upload the setup_6581.hex. Now this is where things went from happy sunshine to dark clouds in a few seconds. MIOS Studio started to send the code but then the LCD showed "MIOS rebooting" but nothing happened. I waited for a few minutes but since nothing ever happened I eventually restarted the MIDIBOX. And now all I get is two blank lines on the LCD. No OS-info. No READY. Only two blank lines and two lines with blocks. I've started reading documents on troubleshooting but I'm really afraid to mess up even more... :( *EDIT* I may have figured out the problem... I'll let you know.

Day 3 (of building). I've been busy with other stuff but today I finally had time to assemble the SID-module. It was really straight forward. Only problem was that I didn't have SIL-headers for the audio-connectors but I cut some DIL-headers to get bi-pole SILs :) Tested it with some crocodile clamps and and more plier made connectors. 11.95V between the 12V points of the IC. Another success! However now I've run into some trouble. It's time to connect the SID-module with the CORE-module and as mentioned earlier I use the optimized PSU-layout. I've edited the schematics to visualize my problem for you. The "problem" is the 2200uF in point 2.a. I can understand the need for this cap in a multi-SID environment but the 5V line here is already filtered in point 1, and there really isn't anything in between except from the 100nF cap. So I basically have three questions. (see attached schematic) 1. Do I need the 2200uF cap in point 2.a even in this single SID environment. 2. Does it have to be as close as possible to J2 on the SID or could I put it in point 2.b? It would be more easy to solder it to the PSU-board. 3. If it has to be as close as possible to J2. How are people solving that, and what do people attach them to? (Pictures would be great.)

Day2. Core day. Today I started assembling the core. It was straight forward and having smashtvs homepage open during the process was great help. There are many solder joints but they are all pretty easy so it didn't take very long. I was careful soldering the transistor, using a crocodile clamp as heatsink. After assembly I tested the 5V points and got 0V everywhere. It didn't take long to figure out that I had forgotten about bridging IC3. After that i got about 5.3V. As mentioned yesterday my PSU delivers about 5.3V on the 5V line so thats OK. To be able to test it I decided to hook up the LCD. Now this was a total pain and the reason for that was that my wirestripper doesn't handle wire as thin as that. I tried a knife, wirecutter, scissors... you name it. After struggling for a long time with getting all 16 wires correctly stripped without accidently cutting one to short I finally gave up. I went to the shop and bought myself a nice new wirestripper. What I couldn't do in like 2hours took about 5 minutes when I got back. My LCD layout is mirrored to the one in the schematics so I took great care in getting everything right. I hooked it all up and got... a blank LCD. I first blamed one of my homemade dil-connectors (I will hard-solder those connections after building everything anyways but the plier crimped power connectors work for now). But it turned out that it was in fact the pots that just needed adjusting. A few seconds of tweaking and I got excellent light and contrast. Doesn't show up that great in the picture, plus the protective sheet is still on, but it's negative white on blue backlight. I've never seen any word as beautiful as "READY."

I've been planing my midibox for about two months now. But since I've been busy with other stuff too I haven't been able to get started. Until today! I love what you guys are doing with mb6582s and superdupermidiboxes and sure it would be fun to build something like that someday. But for now it's a mono sid with a simple control surface. So time to get building: First mission was to scavenge the SID-chip. Nothing strange here. I knew that it was a 6581 and it wasn't hard-soldered so no problems getting it out of the C64. I also took the powerled. While planing I decided against using the powerplug from the C64 and going with a panelmount one so I didn't take that. The reason for this is that the MIDI-sockets and RCA jacks are going to be panelmount because I want them to be more "trip-on-the-wire-proof". I also don't like to drill square holes. :) Next mission was to build the PSU. After carefully reading the schematics for the optimized PSU for a last time I started assembling it. Now building on a perfboard with solder islands turned out to be harder than I first thought. Geting the components on the board was easy but connecting them to eachother was a bit trickier. I used the connecting solder blobs technique and it felt a bit risky with the possible cold joints but it turned out fine. I also used wire for the longer connections. Apart form one bad solder connection progress was slow but smooth. The end result was quite nice and tidy. (Except the ugly underside, I might actually go for stripboard for the CS later on, blobbing just isn't my style.) My caps are good for 35V so they are a bit big but otherwise it's quite compact. End result: 14V DC = 14.4V DC, 5V DC = 5.3V DC. I guess that will drop closer to x.0 with some load. To be continued.... Btw crimping the sil-connectors with just a pair of pliers is quite tedious and I've only done four so far. ;)