HardSID

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The HardSID is a family of sound cards, produced by a Hungarian company Hard Software and originally conceived by Teli Sándor.

The HardSID cards are based on the MOS Technology SID (Sound Interface Device) chip which was popularised and immortalized by the Commodore 64 home computer. It was the second non-Commodore SID-based device to enter market (the first was the SidStation MIDI synthetiser, by Elektron). HardSID's major advantage over SidStation (apart from the fact that the SidStation has been sold out long since, and only few unused pieces surface now and then) is that it is a simple hardware interface to a SID chip, making it far more suitable for emulator use, SID music players and even direct programming - SidStation only responds to MIDI information and requires music events to be converted to MIDI and back.

The original HardSID (1999) was a card for the ISA bus (instantaneously anachronizing the item), containing a slot for one SID chip. From the beginning, HardSID has supported both the 6581 and the 8580 models of SID, including all revisions.

Currently, HardSID cards are only available for the PCI bus. This includes both the standard 1-SID version and HardSID Quattro, which includes slots for four SID chips and a surprising cooling fan (surprising because one SID dissipates only a couple of milliwatts of power under normal operation).

HardSID cards are supported by most modern SID music playing applications, including sidplay and ACID64 Player and some trackers such as GoatTracker. The ISA cards have official drivers for Microsoft Windows, and the PCI ones for Mac OS X as well as Windows. Unofficial drivers are available for Linux.

Hard Software also has a separate MIDI driver product for the HardSID, which allows any MIDI-capable instrument or sequencer program to drive the card.

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