ccovell wrote:My point was that many PSG chips (ones without a hardware volume sweep / fader) are like a piano whose note never fades away -- the "musician" / programmer / whatever has to take it upon himself to program in the fading of each note by twiddling the volume like a madman. Even "expressiveness" would have to be programmed in manually. At the very least, the SID takes that chore away from the non-technical person in that a natural-sounding note can be played with a single push-button coming out of the machine.
Okay, but you explicitly compared it to the AY, 2A03, and YM (which YM?) which
ALL have envelope generators. The SID has a
better envelope generator than AY and 2A03 for sure, but a worse envelope generator than
every YM FM chip.
So, all of these chips have a "fire and forget" way of playing notes, but I think it's kind of strange to think of this as an advantage, because almost nobody wanted to do that with these chips. SID music
typically is frantically writing registers every single frame (e.g. the omni-present arps). With all the work they're already doing, it would not have been any problem to update volume each frame, and it would have had a huge advantage in balancing sound. I think it's truly bizarre that the SID is so feature-packed but omits this one crucial control.
Of these, only MIDI-controlled FM typically operates with sparse register writes. MIDI is really the only place it's an advantage, since you have somewhat limited control bandwidth, but for something directly connected to the CPU like a SID it's a non-issue to update it every frame.
Even if the SID ADSR had a channel volume control, like YM FM always does, that would still be a huge advantage without having to update every frame. My point is that it has no good per-channel volume control. Whether or not you want to do volume macros is a completely different issue from whether or not you can control the overall volume of a note
at all.
