Zsid

by Vincent Penne

What is it ?

ZSid is a C64 Sid music player. It is a sort of mixture of several libraries

libsidplay : the Michael Scwendt SID and MOS-6510 emulators (see his page here)
FLTK : a wonderful multiplatform GUI toolkit library by Bill Spitzak (FLTK's homepage here)
the STIL class reading library by Lala, to read in the STIL database informations about tunes being played (see Lala's very nice SID page)

Altogether it gives you a nice player for Microsoft Windoz and Unix machines. The best feature currently is its music selection browser, which will remember any music you have played so far, and display them sorted, either by author, either by song name only. It can also store the length of the music (in time) and loop position, so that in the future a playlist could use this information to play each tune only once before skipping to the next.

I recommend you to use it with the HVSC collection of C64 music, which is the most complete I know. It is furthermore provided with the STIL database which contains many interesting information about the songs and their author. Zsid will display these informations in a user friendly and colorful way.

What's new ?

17th marsh 1999 : more stable sound under windoz (no more problem when switching task). No more crash when changing replay frequency.

Making possible to change music by pressing key '1' to '9'.
10th marsh 1999 : corrected redraw bugs with the oscilloscope window. Furthermore, it seems to be less CPU time wasting !

5th marsh 1999 : now using Directsound under windoz, so no more crack and tick when launching the first song. Also it seems that Zsid now does not crash when you 've been using it for a long time (before, I was using an interruption with Libmm under windoz, and it seem it was not very stable ...)

The HVSC "set root directory" dialog has been moved in the option dialog window.
However there are a few minor problems now : it sometimes crash when you try to change the replay frequency (try rather to change the frequency by small steps only), and the sound sometimes does not get refreshed while you move the Zsid window (but you don't plane to spend all your time moving this window around, do you ? :).
16th february 1999 : amelioration of the "set root directory" dialog to select the location of the HVSC directory. Now it will be saved with the music directory, and not only in the options.

I am looking for a graphist !

You might have remarked that Zsid lackes seriously of nice icons and window background. If anybody has something nice to propose me, I'll be very glad of it !

Get it

for 386 Linux based machine : download
for Micro$oft Windoz machine : download
the sources : download

Zsid could also work on the following platform : Irix on Silicon Graphics,SunOS on Sun sparcstation, Linux on Acorn RiscPC. Please tell me if you succesfully install it on another platform !

Zsid is under GPL license. Click on Copyright in the program to see details of the license.

You can contact the author by Email : Vincent.Penne@wanadoo.fr, or have a look at his homepage.

Here is a snapshot ...