SIDs through the ages

Here is a glimpse of some of my collected chips.

While the first one on this picture is dated 83, ive seen a few 1982 ones.
(i must have got one somewhere, probably broken in a bin :)
So they span roughly 10 years in production, in various places in the world
Phillipines, Korea, Hong Kong.

Its hard to find perfectly good working pre-8580 SID chips, as the vast majority of them all seem to have defects in one area or another due to age or power on/off cycle stress. (higher heat dissipation?)

Sometimes its missing voices, missing noises, filter nearly silent, etc.

I try to capture waveforms and run tests the best I can with them. I've got
a perfectly running 6581R4 AR that I baby everyday (not pictured here due to its ugly "blurred in white goo" look)

Comments

  1. I'dd kill for 8 perfectly working SID's

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  2. Has anyone ever tried to develop a clone product or re-manufacture them/make new ones?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There are a few FPGA or MCU clones, but to copy and reproduce the die as is would be prohibitively expensive (or impossible?) due to the fact that the process they used is completely obsolete.

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    2. Can the clones act as drop-in replacements? (my instinct is to say they're different chip types, electrically and pin-wise)

      Interesting that the process used to make the originals is so obsolete as to be prohibitively expensive.

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