Loading software on a vintage computer, such as a Commodore 64, is a pain. Early eight-bit computers almost never contained any onboard persistent storage, so users had to load software from external media like cassette tapes. To make retro computing far more convenient, RaspberryPioneer developed a method for loading Commodore 64 software from Microsoft Excel.
This workflow starts with a modern computer running Microsoft Excel. RaspberryPioneer created an Excel spreadsheet that acts as a database of Commodore 64 software, linking to the ROMs and containing information such as specific load commands. The spreadsheet integrates Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming, so the user can select a software entry and then launch it. Doing so sends that software’s ROM data to the Commodore 64, which loads the software like it came from conventional media.
RaspberryPioneer’s workflow relies on a 5V Arduino board to act as an intermediary between the modern computer and the Commodore 64. The Excel VBA script sends the selected ROM data to the Arduino via a USB serial connection. The Arduino then, in turn, sends the data to the Commodore 64 through a hardware serial connection. That requires a Commodore serial cable, with the standard plug at one end and the other end connected to the Arduino’s pins.
We have a special blog today from one of our own design engineers, Simon Martin. He’s the designer of Raspberry Pi 400 and our High Quality Camera and spends his free time tinkering with electronic music.
Simon has wanted to make his own electronic musical instrument with Raspberry Pi for some time. He designed a circuit board for the project a year ago, but it lay around in a drawer in his desk while he finished Raspberry Pi 400. Finally, the winter months gave him the incentive to get it working.
Simon’s electronic musical journey
Simon: The Synth6581 device doesn’t look much like an electronic musical instrument, but just like circuit boards stacked on top of a Raspberry Pi 4. You have to plug a musical keyboard into a USB port and a pair of speakers into the audio jack on the bottom board to make it work.
Hefty stack ready to play some electronic music
The code is written almost entirely in Python, with a little bit of C to speed up the communications to the chips. I designed and laid out the circuit boards, which were ordered online. The first six boards cost only £20, but the components were another £100. I spent more than a day soldering the components on the boards by hand. It took much more time to check every chip and connection worked, a common problem with hand-soldering new boards.
Synth6581 — no ordinary sounding instrument
The 1982 Commodore 64 – works like Raspberry Pi 400, only slower
And Synth6581 is no ordinary sounding musical instrument. It’s based on the music chip inside a vintage computer: the Commodore 64. The microchips are almost forty years old and they have a quirky sound that kids in the 1980s loved and parents hated. By the way, did you know that the Commodore 64 was the inspiration for Raspberry Pi 400?
The SID chip sound
The MOS6581 SID chip — just a little smaller than a Raspberry Pi Pico board
I was one of many hobby programmers in the 1980s that used to attempt to program Commodore 64s. Much like people today dabble with programming on Raspberry Pi 400s, kids and adults were dabbling with the BASIC programming language on their Commodore 64s back then. Nowadays, Raspberry Pis have video, graphics, and audio readily available, but back in the 1980s, the hardware registers had to be ‘poked’ one by one into the console window. You had to get quite technical just to get the computer to make a musical sound. Those sounds came from the MOS6581 or ‘SID’ chip. It had such a famous sound character that it formed the basis of the chiptune music genre, and people are still writing music on Commodore 64s today.
Using BASIC POKE commands to control SID chips on a Commodore 64. Not the easiest thing to read.
Poking SID chips
By borrowing a few chips from broken Commodore 64s, including one or two lying around Raspberry Pi Towers, I made those 1980s ping noises into a polyphonic synthesiser controlled in Python on Raspberry Pi. The registers in the SID chips are simply being ‘poked’ by Raspberry Pi instead of Commodore 64. I also reverse-engineered the music from old games and made the sound effects and instruments work across the keyboard.
Simon with his electronic music creation
One of a kind electronic musical device
This device is unique: only one of these will ever be built, so please don’t wait for a launch date. There were over 10 million chips manufactured for Commodore 64, but production of the chips ended nearly 30 years ago. The Commodore 64s and spare parts for them are still in high demand, which is pushing up second hand prices. Nonetheless, the code and schematics are available online on GitHub, and I invite other Raspberry Pi users to use them to make musical instruments out of other games consoles. I reckon Sega Megadrive has a lot of potential for a Raspberry Pi port…
A few of the demos of the electronic instrument on Simon’s YouTube channel
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