I can’t get enough of the YM2151 chip (from a Commodore 64) music. This is a pretty good example of the YM2151 power to create great sounds. Here’s a bit of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony on a YM2151 chip.

From the YouTube page:
A Yamaha YM2151 FM Synthesiser IC playing the Second Movement of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. The CPU of the synth is a MOS 6510 CPU from a Commodore 64. The music was played over a MIDI interface. If you notice any synchronization glitches with the different instruments it’s because they weren’t recorded at the same time, but separately and mixed later.

Here’s some more SID music (and sound effects) for you:

Believe it or not, the Commodore 64’s SID chip was my first real synthesizer. An amazing little 4-voice digital synth packed into one amazing chip. Here’s a rendering of Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring on an emulated C-64.

From Wikipedia:
The SID was devised by engineer Robert “Bob” Yannes, who later co-founded the Ensoniq digital synthesizer company. Yannes headed a team that included Yannes, two technicians and a CAD operator running Applicon (now a part of the UGS Corp.), who designed and completed the chip in five months’ time in the latter half of 1981. Yannes was inspired by previous work in the synthesizer industry and was not impressed by the current state of computer sound chips. Instead, he wanted a high-quality instrument chip, which is the reason why the SID has features like the envelope generator, previously not found in home computer sound chips.

The SID chip featured:

• three separately programmable independent audio oscillators (8 octave range, approximately 16 – 4000 Hz)
• four different waveforms per audio oscillator (sawtooth, triangle, pulse, noise)
• one multi mode filter featuring low-pass, high-pass and band-pass outputs with 6 dB/oct (bandpass) or 12 dB/octave (lowpass/highpass) rolloff. The different filter-modes are sometimes combined to produce additional timbres, for instance a notch-reject filter.
• three attack/decay/sustain/release (ADSR) volume controls, one for each audio oscillator.
• three ring modulators.
• oscillator sync for each audio oscillator.
• two 8-bit A/D converters (typically used for game control paddles, but later also used for a mouse)
• external audio input (for sound mixing with external signal sources)
• random number/modulation generator

Interested in playing with the SID for your own recordings? Hop on over to Madame Blavatsy’s and get yourself a SID VSTi plugin for your favorite DAW.