| There was definitely sound digitizer hardware available for the c64 back in the day. I knew someone who owned one, but have no idea what brand/model it was. (I would have been 7 years old at the time). I have a disk with a sampled song on it. Takes about 5 minutes to load, plays for 3 or 4 seconds, then gives you an out-of-memory error.
As far as I know, the SID was not designed to reproduce sampled audio, but crafty programmers exploited a hardware bug and made it possible. Upon changing the main volume (which was a 4-bit value), a high frequency click noise would occur, and the frequency of this click was determined by the change of this 4-bit register. So you're limited to 4-bit sampling, pretty lo-fi.
I managed to get my hands on a SidStation a few years ago. Sounds great, but it's very noisy (but apparently not as noisy as a SID chip sitting inside a c64). The SID is in numerous commercial tunes, eg Zombie Nation, Ayo Technology... Its sound is unique and instantly recognizable. |