C64 music

The C64 released by Commodore in 1982 was a home computer with 64kB of RAM and a "MOS 6510" 8-bit CPU clocked at around 1MHz. It was very popular as a gaming device but many users also discovered their love for computer programming on this machine. One thing that stood out when comparing the machine to its competitors of the era, was its capacity to make music with its MOS Technology "Sound Interface Device" (SID) audio chip. Check out the SPECIALS section for more information.

Some of the music creation tools publically available on the machine where quite popular among DIY home computer musicians, e.g. the "COMPUTE!'s Sidplayer" (published in 1984 by the "Comptute Gazette" magazine) over the years was used to create more than 16'000 songs.

Users not involved in "music composing activities" usually appreciated the professionally created music that could be found in their favorite games. It wasn't unusual for people to run some game just to hear its particularly catchy music and the names of the game music creators (Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, Ben Daglish, etc) were often better known than those of most game creators. Supposedly the C64 owed much of its populatity to the fact that software piracy was rampant, at least among kids who usually "swapped" their games among friends rather than spend money that they did not have. (Though the same was equally true for the Apple II users, etc.) But on the C64 sometimes it wasn't even the crappy games that "the pirates" were after but rather the music that came in those games. Soon the more technically savy kids started to rip music out of the games so that it could be listend to directly without the inconvenience of the game. Respective ripped-songs collections where but a taste of the things to come and still contained but a few hundred songs (e.g. see above screens from a 1987 collection).

With its progressing age the C64 quicky lost its appeal as a gaming device but still hung on for a few more years while the faster competitors like the 16-bit Amiga or the Atari ST (that had both been released in 1985) grew in popularity. Interestingly the C64 did not die completely once it had lost its commercial appeal, but it preserved a corner of the playground for what is known as the "demo scene": And so it is that more than 40 years after its release the C64 is still used by a scene of computer geeks to write "just for fun" software and music for that ancient hardware, i.e. the list of C64 music still keeps growing longer.

It seems that even people who had moved on to computers like the more recent Amiga, still missed the old C64 music. And around 1990 somebody created a C64 music emulator/player named PlaySID for the Amiga. This laid the foundation for the file format that is still used most often in the context of C64 music collections. It seems more people started to rip music from old C64 programs to then package it using PlaySID's file format and when the first "HSVC (High Voltage SID Collection) #1.0" was released in 1996 it contained already more than 4'000 of such music files. The respective HVSC #82 release from 2024 meanwhile contains around 60'000 music files and can be downloaded from the HVSC page.

As an alternative the respective files can also be browsed and played online using DeepSID which is where many new songs created in "the scene" today get posted before they find their way into the next HVSC release.