Compute's Gazette Sid Collection
Version 1.13
Released in June 2005

COMPUTE!'s Sidplayer was a music system created by Craig Chamberlain and Harry Bratt for the Commodore 64 home computer. Sidplayer was the most popular Commodore 64 music system in the U.S., as measured by the number of songs available for download on services such as Compuserve and Q-Link (the forerunner to America Online).

The aim of the Compute's Gazette Sid Collection is to try and preserve as many of those Sidplayer music files in one location as possible. The current collection contains 6507 MUS files, 1448 STR files and 1766 WDS files.

NOTE: MUS files contain music, STR files contain voices 4-6 for stereo music and WDS files contain the words to the tune.

PC friendly version 1.13

Main Collection

Note: You will need 7-zip to decompress the .7z files.

Another Sidplayer page I recommend you take a look at sometime is Craig Chamberlain's web site. It has some interesting information about the Enhanced Sidplayer and also about a few Sid Authors.

If you want to download any of the MUS files in the CGSC collection individually then you should take a look at David Strauss's web site.

Also, if you do not already have a copy of SIDPLAY2/W, you might want to download SIDPLAY2/W for Windows so that you can play the music collection on your PC.

The lastest versions of SIDPLAY2/W can now play .mus and .str files at the same time.
You could also take a look at sidplay2 from http://sidplay2.sourceforge.net/.

Playing Stereo Music in VICE v1.9

Settings to make Mark Dickenson's Stereo Player work in stereo mode
(both the .MUS and .STR files playing simultaneously with the graphics in sync)

Run VICE to get the Commodore 64 blue screen.

Under Settings Menu: Sound settings, DirectX driver, Sample Frequency 44100 Hz, Sound Buffer Size 100msec (350msec out of sync), Oversampling Factor 2x, Synchronization Method Exact

Under Settings Menu: SID Settings: SID Model 8580 (new), Stereo SID at $DE00

Under Settings Menu: Drive Settings 1581 (or 1541)

Under Options Menu: Video Standard, NTSC-M

Under Options Menu: Virtual Device traps checked. (Leave True Drive Emulation unchecked it is way too slow when checked.)

Under File Menu: Attach Disk Image, Drive 8, type .d81 (or .d64) virtual disk file (with Stereo Player Ver. 10.3 and .MUS and .STR files on it). Attach it.

Under File Menu: Attach Disk Image, Drive 9, type .d81 (or .d64) virtual disk file (with more .MUS and .STR files on it). Attach it.

Load and run the Stereoplayer Boot Program and press "N" and away you go. (I have to do a run, enter after it loads, as the comma 8 comma 1 doesn't make the automatic run work and the JiffyDOS British Pound symbol and command aren't emulated.)

Thanks to John Kaputa for supplying the above information.

If you have any comments on this web page then email p w e i g h i l l @ h o t m a i l . c o m