[sdiy] New DIY synth has born

[Batz Goodfortune]

Y-ellow Thorsten 'n' all.
         I could have just sent private mail to Throsten about this but I 
was also curious if anyone else here had any thoughts on the matter.

Thorsten; I was looking over your site with regards to the SID chip. It 
dawned on me what my stumbling block with the SID was. And what I noticed 
was that it doesn't look like you dealt with the problem either. Or more 
precisely, Like I had thought myself, you'd side stepped the issue.

That issue being, reading back from the SID. I'm doing this from memory and 
I really should be sleeping right now but I can't help the need to run this 
up the flat pole as it were. So bear with me here. If memory serves, you 
can only read back from the SID if it's synced to the 1-meg clock? The 
timing is just fine using a 6502 but that's the SID's intended host. I'm 
wondering if you, or anyone else here had actually tried to read back from 
a SID. Successfully or otherwise.

It's not just so as to get access to the two pot ports. Which would be 
handy of course. But also because there is a distinct lack of linkage 
between certain elements with the SID and *for example* the filter. If one 
wished to use OSC 3 as an LFO for filter sweeps, one would have to be able 
to read back the value and then feed that back into the filter control 
register.

Now excuse me if I'm not entirely up to speed here. I'm across a million 
things right now, I'm tired and this is the first time in ages I've looked 
into the SID. I can't remember exactly what the deal is here, It might have 
been reading from the EGs not the LFO. But what ever it was, to get round 
the problem I remember having to read data back and plug it in somewhere 
else. And to do that meant somehow doing a synchronous read.

I'm pretty sure it was something to do with the sound architecture being 
synchronized/triggered by a note-on event every time. Thus preventing 
anything from being independently free-running. Just about every roland 
synth ever made suffered with this "Feature" and in the words of Monty 
Python. "My wife calls it intuition but I call it bullshit and it gets me 
very IRRITATED."

Admittedly, at the time I was thinking of a box with 8 SID chips arranged 
in 4 pairs for stereo. Each pair also having it's own OPL3. But this would 
have given an interface for 16 pots and some really fine stereo blending. 
But regardless of which, I certainly don't want to have to use a 6502. I 
don't have anything against 6502s per se but I just don't want to have to 
ever use one.

So anyway, If anyone had any thoughts on this problem, successful ones or 
otherwise, I'd be most intrigued to read of your ingenuity.

Thanks in advance. I go shut down brain now.

Be absolutely Icebox.

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