1989 - SIDMon (Amiga)

The first tracker featuring ‘synthesis’ for the Amiga. Very rough app, which didn’t have user friendliness high in it’s aims. With it you could create very tiny (filesize) tracks with synthetic instruments which resembled the very distinctive sounds of the C64 SID chip. The term for these tracks nowadays would be ‘chiptunes’ The program was based on the Sound monitor programmed by Chris Hülsbeck. Hence the name SIDMon.

Flod is an open-source project build by Christian Corti and features a lot of Amiga players converted to C and even emulates the Amiga sound hardware. Very cool. I’ve ported/adapted/hacked the FLOD player so it plays with the same minimal webgui as Syntrax in the browser.

Here is a selection of tracks which can be listened to:

Tracks by Ramon Braumuller:
Venomwing (Amiga game) Intro Title End
Army game
Ear demo A
Ear demo B
Ode to Tim Follin
Ragnov (A game prototype) (This tune ended up as Hoi level 3 music)
SIDmon Intro
Sliding away
Sad story

The app features waveform sound synthesis, sample playback (although it only had a few hardcoded samples), and a sequencer.

The app first saw the light of day in 1987, but it wasn’t until 1989 that we published it through Turtle Byte, a german publisher which turned out to be very untrustworthy (as was the norm for game publishers back in the day).

A short time later we upgraded SIDMon to ‘The Digital Mugician’, a more mature version which we published at Thalamus