Q-SID: a 4-voice polyphonic MIDI synth based on four SID 8580 chips
Features:
Hardware/OS:
Q-SID will have a modular construction: every functional block of the device will have it's own PCB:
- CPU board - Raspberry Pi, or other SoC board with two I2C busses, UART, at least 16 GPIO's, USB and ethernet
- four voice boards, each with one 8580 SID chip
- MIDI interface board
- DSP/mixer board
- front controls board with rotary encoders and buttons for sound parameters control
- front display board
- I2C voltage level converter for voice boards
- power supply with +9V, +5V switched for CPU, +5V linear for voice boards, +3.3V
Q-SID will have an operating system in form of single multithreaded process of Linux OS, running on custom Raspbian image scaled down to stripped Linux kernel, Q-SID OS process, and prefferably nothing more (to spare CPU cycles and other resources).
Synthetizer features:
- 4 SID engines with full SID features
- polyphonic mode with 4 voice polyphony
- performance mode with keyboard/voice/patch split
- arpeggiator (not sure about exact parameters yet)
- 2 software LFO's modulating filter cutoff/resonance, PWM, oscillator detune, and other parameters
- onboard sound effects via internal DSP
- MIDI in/out with programmable MIDI channel
- embedded .sid chiptune player
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