MB-6582
A DIY synthesizer powered by eight Commodore 64 SID chips playing as one instrument — Wilba's legendary MidiBox SID build, soldered to life with the very same silicon at the heart of my EVO64.
- 8
- SID chips
- 4× PIC18F
- Microcontrollers
- EVO64
- Same silicon as
the problem
The MOS SID is the most characterful sound chip ever made — the voice of the Commodore 64. I wanted to build an instrument that put eight of them in one box, playing together.
Eight SIDs, one instrument
The MB-6582 is the celebrated hardware design of Jason “Wilba” Williams, built on the MidiBox platform created by Thorsten Klose — whose firmware brings it to life. I built one, and it runs on the same SID chip that anchors my EVO64 project, just eight of them at once. Sourcing them was half the battle: the SIDs and their PIC microcontrollers haven't been manufactured in decades, so I hunted them down across eBay and AliExpress, chip by chip.
Then came the soldering — a dense base board carrying eight SID sockets, four PIC18F4685 microcontrollers, EEPROMs and shift registers, plus a control surface packed with encoders, switches, and well over a hundred LEDs (including some fiddly SMD work for the backlit encoder rings). I flashed the PICs with a PicKit 3, brought the boards up on a bench supply, and chased the voltages until eight 40-year-old sound chips sang together.
Deep enough to supply the community
I ended up going further than a single build. Sourcing and programming SID-and-PIC chip sets is genuinely hard, so I started doing it for other builders too — becoming a small node in the MidiBox community's supply chain. It's the instinct that runs through all of this: get deep enough into something to bring not just yourself, but other people, along for the ride.
built with