Closed Try for yourself 6581 2182 SID. Aftermarket.

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I tried mine out with my SID of choice, Great Giana Sisters, since I pretty much know every inflection by heart since childhood. :P At least one of the filters isn't working on mine either. Who knows, maybe the chips are just flaky and not 100% reliable all the time?
 
interesting !

I mainly tested these with 1942, Ghosts'n'Goblins and Last Ninja and I was happy with the sound for a $4 chip.
Im not a musician so would not know about filters turning on and off.
I might now put my stock in the bin :(

Thanks for the feedback :)
 
You should test them with the Alien track to see if any of them sounds decent. It makes very heavy use of the filters so it will sound very wrong if not working right.
It would be nice to know how big a percentage (if any) has working filters.
 
Well, in that case I don't think that these are copies at all. They were probably manufactured as genuine SIDs back in the 80s, but discarded at some point due to quality control. Somehow they were not destroyed at this point but ended up in the market where they were sold after being visually refurbished to look like new. This is how it is with the other 'fake' SIDs out there.

Setting up a new production is a very costly operation and I don't think they can sell enough to make it worthwhile (they would probably need to sell >100000). They might also have to do a redesign since the silicon process used in the original SID is no longer available, and processes that can do mixed A/D are difficult to work with. If it had been a purely digital chip, it would have been easy to copy.
 
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They are copies, the casing and pins are different than original sids.
Apparently they made 100,000 and sold them in 1000 piece lots to the Chinese to sell on Aliexpress.
Also the process they use are of a different technology than back in the 80's.
These fake sids were never put through a test process and sold as is.
Yield is about 60% so a lot of mine that I bought went in the rubbish bin.
The sids worked out a cost of $7 each after sorting.
I was really hopping the sids worked a bit better than they did in your tests.
I still have 20 pieces and dont know what to do with them , lol.

Thanks again
 
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Do these fakes do the analog input for joystick paddles, light pens etc ? Do you still have some left for sale?
 
demolition said:
Well, in that case I don't think that these are copies at all. They were probably manufactured as genuine SIDs back in the 80s, but discarded at some point due to quality control. Somehow they were not destroyed at this point but ended up in the market where they were sold after being visually refurbished to look like new. This is how it is with the other 'fake' SIDs out there.

Setting up a new production is a very costly operation and I don't think they can sell enough to make it worthwhile (they would probably need to sell >100000). They might also have to do a redesign since the silicon process used in the original SID is no longer available, and processes that can do mixed A/D are difficult to work with. If it had been a purely digital chip, it would have been easy to copy.
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If they all have exactly the same problem with the filters they could be copies. The filters are probably the most difficult part to replicate properly.

The silicon process for NMOS and HMOS are still available in a few military fabs which are used to produce chips destined to firing and guidance control systems for nuclear weapons. These are still used for maintenance of nuclear missiles used by both the US and Russia, probably China, France and the UK too.

See: http://theweek.com/articles/533721/dangers-ouraging-nuclear-arsenal
 
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Thanks, I just bought 282174977864 on the other 'Bay as the real deal. I am wondering if this too is a fake. I will have to run the tests with Alien etc to see.
 
Well i paid no fees....

I tested this sid extensively yesterday. I didn't detect any issues. Might just be my ears ??
 
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