Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!labrea!rutgers!mailrus!iuvax!pur-ee!pur-phy!ray
From: ray@maxwell.physics.purdue.edu (Ray Moody)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.cbm
Subject: Re: Music Software
Message-ID: <1618@pur-phy>
Date: 3 Nov 88 01:47:11 GMT
References: <757@mailrus.cc.umich.edu> <1025@cseg.uucp>
Sender: news@pur-phy
Reply-To: ray@maxwell.physics.purdue.edu (Ray Moody)
Organization: Purdue Univ. Physics Dept., W. Lafayette, IN
Lines: 53
In-reply-to: gmg@hcx.uucp (Greg M. Garner)


			  [A posting from my roomie]

In article <1025@cseg.uucp>, gmg@hcx (Greg M. Garner) writes:
>I would be interested in porting a sid player over to the amiga. Can your
>friend suggest the best method of going about this?  I would probably 
>want to write a sidplayer in C, as opposed to the ML it is in now (Right?)
>I do have a _LOT_ of experience on the C64 both in basic and ML, and I 
>now have some C experience on the amiga. Would buying this book give
>me enough information on the format of the sid songs? Any help is greatly
>appreciated. I also am a student, so I can surely appreciate that this
>is how your friend is paying for his education, More power to him!
>Thank you.

Some friends of mine recently thought about the very same project.  I put
them in touch with Craig Chamberlain, and he raised some very interesting
issues that need to be considered:

1) The SID chip in the C-64/128 has enough quirks that making and Amiga sound
   "just like" a SID chip might prove to be very difficult, if not impossible,
   especially since many of the better Sidplayer song authors use these quirks
   to get specific effects.

2) Because of (1), many Sidplayer song authors might see it as rude/
   inappropriate to have such a program on the Amiga.  Many of these authors
   take their Sidplayer songs quite seriously and would feel offended if
   their name showed up on an inferior-sounding version of the song.  Also,
   an attitude previously expressed by some of these people who I know
   indicated that Sidplayer is "just for" the C-64/128-- meaning that they
   wouldn't be particularly happy, interestingly enough, to see Sidplayer
   spread to the Amiga line of computers.

3) Following on (2), these same people seem to feel that the Amiga is
   capable of much more sophisticated music than the Commodore 8-bit
   machines, so that even though the huge Sidplayer library does exist,
   that it would be much better to stick to original, native Amiga
   music playing/editing programs.

4) The whole series of issues about copyrights, etc. would have to be very
   thoroughly and carefully investigated.  Compute! is a part of ABC, which
   undoubtedly has a whole string of lawyers ready to sue the proverbial
   pants off some person they felt was "ripping off" their interests.
   
I believe that Craig is preparing a letter to INFO magazine in hopes of
starting an open forum on these questions.  He would like to get this
discussion widespread so that the wishes/feelings of Sidplayer song
authors could be heard and assessed.

If you would like to contact Craig directly, e-mail my roommate's account,
and I will put you in touch with him.

Kent Sullivan
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