CHIPBLASTER

A portable SID station in the browser: browse and play the High Voltage SID Collection (HVSC) through a hi-fi styled player.

Live site: https://chipblaster.sulopuis.to/ (mirror: https://ollisulopuisto.github.io/chipblaster/)

Screenshots

Desktop	Tune browser (control lid hinged open)

Phone (folded case)	Phone tune browser

Features

• Search a snapshot of the HVSC #85 catalog (June 2026), filter to saved tunes, queue tunes and build a playlist. Search results and the playlist share one window styled as a C64 directory listing: navy paper, Silkscreen capitals, the selected row in reverse video, names that wrap instead of being cut, and a * in front of saved tunes. Four brown keys above the list act on the selected row: play, add to the playlist (remove, in the playlist), a long key (+ ADD ALL TO QUEUE in search, + ADD CURRENT TUNE in the playlist) and save (pushed in when saved). A double-click or double-tap plays a tune at once. The search field is Silkscreen on cream paper with a block cursor.
• Play PSID files with a lightweight JavaScript SID emulator; pick subtunes, switch SID 1 between 6581 and 8580 live, and choose 6581/8580/off for SID 2 on multi-SID tunes. The SID 2 keys are always on the panel; on a one-chip tune OFF stays pushed in and the 6581 and 8580 keys spring back when pressed.
• Infinite play and the queue use catalog duration estimates (three minutes when unknown) as the longest a tune may play. A background worker also scans each SID for its loop (src/sid-loop.ts); when a whole loop fits inside that time, the tune fades out over four seconds and ends on the loop boundary. Tunes without a detectable loop end at the estimate. A dice key loads one random tune. Infinite play plays the queue first, then draws random tunes from what the browser shows when it is switched on: the search results, the star filter or the open folder.
• Three voice meters with waveform lamps (SID 1 amber, SID 2 cyan), a master meter, a frequency spectrum and audio-driven speaker cones.
• Two finishes share the same controls. The model wears the C64's colours and key names (RUN/STOP, CRSR, RESTORE, f1-f7). The first Osaka prototype, in brushed aluminium with the original legends (PLAY/PAUSE, STOP, SHARE, RANDOM), is a hidden extra. The manual hints at it; the way in is to click the name on the base plate, which wiggles once a minute and opens the scroller's 10 PRINT prompt, and to type LOAD"OSAKA" there (the same command switches back). The choice is remembered in localStorage. In the style sheet, every C64 rule is scoped with :not(.jp).
• The player starts folded on every screen size (the carry handle opens it); ?fold=open in a link starts it open.
• LEVEL MATCH (on by default) evens out loud and quiet tunes (src/leveler.ts). It reads the tune's level before the tone controls, averages it, and moves the gain slowly toward about -18 dBFS RMS, within -9 to +6 dB. A soft limiter above 0.8 full scale catches peaks. The gain is saved per tune in localStorage; the key's tooltip shows the gain in use.
• Bass, mid and treble tone knobs with optional parametric frequency/Q (tap or click the knob's name, or right-click or long-press the knob; double-click resets), plus volume on + / -.
• STEREO ENHANCE (the C= key in the C64 finish, with its label printed above it): a mono-safe stereo widener on one-SID tunes, and a chip spread (SID 1 left, SID 2 right) on multi-SID tunes.
• The CRT visualizer imitates the C64's VIC-II: a 368x240 picture drawn at the C64's own size, with a border around a 320x200 window; a second pass stretches it to the tube so that the border keeps a fixed thickness on all four sides (8.5% of the shorter side) while the window takes the rest and its pixels may come out wider or taller than square, only the 16 Pepto colours, 8x8 character cells, 2x1 multicolour pixels, hardware sprites multiplexed in two bands (at most 8 per scanline), raster bars and border flashes on bass hits. Analogue CRT faults are always on but kept quiet: a faint bass wobble, hum bar and noise, a tiny tick every 45 s and one real glitch (tearing, colour split, a flash) about every two and a half minutes. The effects are in src/c64-viz.ts.

Scroller text and the hidden BASIC prompt

The three scroller effects (DYCP scroller, Zoomscroll, Circle scroll) draw the C64 character-ROM letters and show the name of the tune and its author, followed by an optional message of your own (up to 256 characters). Accents are folded to plain letters (Ä and Å become A, Ö becomes O, ß becomes SS, Æ becomes AE, Ø becomes O) in the scroller and in the segment displays. Several effects also take a seed from the tune (its HVSC path, or its title and author for local files): it shifts the phase, rotates the colour ramps and changes the sprite colours, so each tune gets its own look.

The message is an Easter egg. Press the quote key (Shift-2) anywhere on the page, or hold the CHIPBLASTER logo for a moment on a phone. The title display turns into a BASIC prompt, 10 PRINT ", where you type the text; Enter keeps it (and remembers it in the browser), Esc cancels. The share link carries the message as &m=..., so whoever opens the link sees it in the scrollers.

Visualizer effects and their sources

The CRT starts at the C64's BASIC prompt. Turning the thumbwheel (or pressing its arrow keys) reads the directory of effects from the built-in drive (LOAD"$",8 and LIST) and shows it with the chosen effect in reverse video. When the wheel has rested for about 1.6 s, the player types a LOAD command for that effect, searches and loads it with a burst of border stripes, then types RUN and starts it. Scrolling again during the load returns to the directory. A link that names an effect (?visual=) skips the prompt on the first load.

Twenty-seven of the 30 effects follow the SID voices, and a voice muted with the VOICE MUTING SWITCH takes its part away (a sprite, a bar, a spoke, a strand, a wedge, a wave, a letter, a face). Only the three spectrum effects (Open borders, Linecrunch and Noisefader) show the mixed signal. The parts: Voice ring has a spoke per voice, its pitch setting the angle and its level the length, Raster bars and Rotating bars have one bar per voice, Chips DNA one strand per voice, Chess zoomer one sprite per voice, DYCP, Circle scroll and Zoomscroll give each letter a voice, Outrun gives the sun to voice 1, the hills to voice 2 and the bends to voice 3, Shadow cube has one face per voice, Tunnel one wedge per voice, the three plasmas (Char, FLD and AFLI) and Rotozoom have a wave per voice (voices 1-3), FLI has its rings, wobble and glow, and Parallax floor has a hill layer per voice (voices 1-3). Where a part belongs to voices 1-3, both chips count together. The rest of this paragraph describes how the older eight use them. Eight effects follow the SID voices (Ghostbytes, Marchers and Phyllotaxis use each voice's level, waveform and pitch). Sprite multiplex and Balloons give each sprite one voice (SID 1 voices 1-3, SID 2 voices 4-6; one-SID tunes repeat the first three): the voice's level sets the sprite's size and bounce, and its waveform sets the shape (round without data, diamond for triangle, wedge for sawtooth, square for pulse, dithered disc for noise); on Balloons the waveform shows as a pattern. Scope draws one trace per voice, in that voice's own waveform. Stick dancer has one dancer per voice: the level sets the size and the sweep of the moves, a pulse wave snaps between poses, a sawtooth hops and noise shakes. Dot plotter splits its 96 dots between the three voices: level swells and enlarges them, pulse snaps the swell and noise makes them jitter. The levels come from the same pre-filter voice taps as the voice meters and are held at each effect's own frame rate. Each voice's pitch is read from its frequency register (SID 1 voices 1-3, SID 2 voices 4-6) and drives more: the Scope trace oscillates at the note's own rate, Sprite multiplex sprites rise and fall with the pitch, and the Stick dancer lifts its arms for high notes. Piano roll is an effect of its own: each voice scrolls a trail of its pitch to the left (up is higher, thicker is louder, the waveform sets the texture). Every effect except Open borders also gets a small meter per voice in the top and bottom border. Where a voice has no pitch or level data (the jsSID fallback has no pitch), the effects fall back to the three frequency bands.

The thumbwheel cycles 30 effects built after the demoscene's best-rated C64 productions (ranking from CSDb, 2026). They are my own GLSL imitations running under the C64's limits (16 Pepto colours, 8x8 cells, sprite limits, per-effect frame rates), not ports of the original code:

• Edge of Disgrace (Booze Design): chess zoomer with sprites, AFLI double-sine plasma, dot plotter morphing between sphere, torus and heart.
• Coma Light 13 (Oxyron): parallax hills and floor, flat-shaded cube with a real-time shadow. The cube is drawn the way a C64 would: three filled polygons in three shades and a hard shadow polygon on a fixed chessboard floor, with the corners rounded to whole pixels, not ray traced.
• Uncensored (Booze Design): 360-degree rotating raster bars, zoomscroll through all borders.
• Comaland (Censor Design, Oxyron): vector stick figure.
• Next Level (Performers): noise fader.
• Viva Las Vegas (Censor Design): Chips DNA helix, circle scroll.
• The Hat (Fairlight, Genesis Project): balloon sprites.
• No Sprites (Fairlight; code Trident, music Fegolhuzz, graphics tNG): Ghostbytes. It is made of colour-register splits and the idle graphics byte only, with no characters, bitmap or sprites. Each SID voice is a raster bar; the line splits where the voice's pitch puts it, and the ghost byte right of the split follows the waveform and shifts every line like a $d016 fine scroll.
• Rodents in the Attic (Lft of Kryo): Marchers, a PETSCII cartoon. Six triple-size walkers, one per voice, march in step on the spot over rolling hills of text blocks that scroll past, and hop when their voice is loud. A faint skyline behind them follows the spectrum. The march speeds up and lets go in cycles.
• Phyllotaxis LED display (jagi.studio): Phyllotaxis. Seed n sits at n times the golden angle and a radius proportional to the square root of n, which draws the sunflower's spirals. Every sixth seed belongs to one voice, so the spiral arms are the voices: a voice's level swells its seeds and its waveform picks their shape. The spectrum widens the dots ring by ring (bass in the middle, treble at the rim), a wave runs outward through the brightness, and the flower grows and shrinks.
• Big sprites: all eight hardware sprites, each double size, carry one picture of a SID chip (4 across, 2 down). They sit together, pull apart in a wave, orbit and wander off, and snap back into the picture with a jolt. The pins on top light with the voices.
• The classics: raster bars, sprite multiplexing, char plasma, rotozoomer, tunnel, open borders, DYCP, FLD, FLI and linecrunch.
• Cycle visualizer presets with the thumbwheel; fold the case to hide the visualizer while music keeps playing.
• Share a link to the current tune, and save favorites in this browser.
• An in-app manual (MANUAL key on the base plate) lists the controls and shortcuts.

Keyboard: Space play/pause, S stop, ←/→ previous/next song, +/- volume, F favorite, E eject (open the browser; the same key closes it), [ ] previous/next subtune, 1 saved tunes, 2–4 catalog browser. Shortcuts pause while typing.

Run locally

Node 22.12 or newer:

npm ci
npm run dev       # dev server, URL printed by Vite
npm run build     # production build in dist/
npm run preview   # serve the build

No server component is needed. The player fetches individual SID files from the Modland HVSC mirror, so the mirror must be reachable and allow browser (CORS) access. Recently played tunes are cached in the browser (up to 100 entries, subject to storage limits). Favorites and cached tunes stay local to each browser and origin; they do not sync between devices or domains.

Deployment

.github/workflows/pages.yml type-checks, builds and deploys to GitHub Pages on every push to main (pull requests build only). The site is served from the custom domain chipblaster.sulopuis.to (public/CNAME) and works from a repository path or a domain root, since Vite uses relative asset paths.

Limitations

• SID only. There is no local file picker, drag-and-drop or audio export.
• The emulator is lightweight: RSID tunes need full C64 emulation, and some digi effects or unusual players may sound different.
• The catalog is a snapshot, not a live index; the mirror can lag or be unavailable.

Sources and rights

CHIPBLASTER is free software: you can redistribute it and modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3 only (see LICENSE). Copyright (C) 2026 Olli Sulopuisto. It is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty. The version 3 licence is needed because the disk drive sounds come from the 1541 Ultimate firmware (GPL-3.0); libsidplayfp (GPL-2.0-or-later) can be used under it.

The UI code in src/App.tsx and src/style.css was written for this project. Bundled third-party code: Hermit's jsSID emulator (src/vendor/hermit-jsSID.js, permissive use with credit: https://github.com/og2t/jsSID/blob/master/README.txt), and 16-segment glyphs based on David Madison's MIT-licensed LED-Segment-ASCII (src/vendor/LED-SEGMENT-ASCII-LICENSE.txt). Third-party parts keep their own licenses, listed in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md. The HVSC tunes and metadata are not covered by this license.

Credits, as listed in the in-app manual: libsidplayfp (Simon White's sidplay2, Antti Lankila, Leandro Nini and contributors; GPL-2.0-or-later) with SIDLite (Leandro Nini) and reSIDfp (Dag Lem, Antti Lankila, Ken Händel and Leandro Nini, after Dag Lem's reSID), built for the web by libsidplayfp-wasm (Chris Gleissner); jsSID by Hermit (Mihaly Horvath); the Silkscreen pixel font (SIL OFL, src/fonts/OFL.txt); the HVSC catalog served from the Modland mirror; the demoscene productions listed under the visualizer effects, found through CSDb; and the VIC-II palette as measured by Pepto. Disk drive sounds: recordings from the 1541 Ultimate firmware (roms/sounds.bin, Gideon Zweijtzer; GPL-3.0), in src/drive-samples.ts; the mixing and the head model follow VICE's drive sound code (Kajtar Zsolt), which was studied, not copied.

HVSC tunes are copyrighted and are not included; see https://hvsc.c64.org/download/C64Music/DOCUMENTS/HVSC.txt. This is an independent fan project, not affiliated with HVSC or the library authors.

Last.fm scrobbling (optional)

The LAST.FM key on the bottom plate links the player to a Last.fm account. While linked, a tune is sent as "now playing" when it starts and scrobbled after half its length or four minutes (tunes under 30 seconds are skipped). Artists lose a trailing scene handle: "Marcin Majdzik (Psycho)" becomes "Marcin Majdzik". Scrobbles that cannot be sent wait in the browser and go out later. Each person links their own account in their own browser; the session key never leaves it.

Last.fm signs every write call with a shared secret, so a small Cloudflare Worker (worker/lastfm-signer) does the signing and the secret never reaches the page. To switch it on:

1. Create an API account at https://www.last.fm/api/account/create. Note the API key and the shared secret.
2. Deploy the Worker (see worker/lastfm-signer/README.md): put the API key and the site origin in wrangler.toml, store the secret with npx wrangler secret put LASTFM_SECRET, run npx wrangler deploy.
3. In the GitHub repository settings add two variables (Settings, Secrets and variables, Actions, Variables): LASTFM_API_KEY and LASTFM_SIGNER_URL (the Worker URL, without a trailing slash).
4. Build as usual. Without the variables the LAST.FM key is hidden.

For local testing put VITE_LASTFM_API_KEY and VITE_LASTFM_SIGNER in .env.local.

SID engines

The default sound comes from libsidplayfp's SIDLite (WebAssembly, GPL-2.0-or-later, libsidplayfp-wasm), shown as LITE in the status window. The ENHANCED key in the OPTION hatch switches to reSIDfp (RESID), the emulation closest to the real chip and several times heavier. The choice is remembered. If an engine cannot start, or the sound runs out repeatedly because the device is too slow, the player steps down on its own: RESID to LITE, and LITE to the original jsSID (JS). The status window always shows which engine is playing.

?engine=js, ?engine=sidlite and ?engine=residfp force an engine without remembering it, and ?debug shows a readout of the engine and its load.

The engine renders in a Web Worker (src/fp-worker.ts) and streams PCM to a small AudioWorklet (src/fp-sink-worklet.js); src/fp-player.ts presents the same surface as the jsSID player. Voice meters and STEREO ENHANCE come from a jsSID core that plays the same tune alongside in the worker, because libsidplayfp gives only the mixed sound. The meters follow the tune, not the exact sound of the engine, and the width effect is the same signal added to libsidplayfp's mix. Tape speed is a resampler in the sink and is identical for all engines. Multi-SID tunes use libsidplayfp's own chip placement. RSID tunes that need C64 ROM images do not play, as the ROMs are not bundled. Seeking fast-forwards the engine silently, about 25 times faster than real time with SIDLite; the analysis core behind the meters only runs its player routine until the last second before the target, then catches up its SID (skipCpu in src/vendor/sid-core.js).

Control hatch and video standard

MANUAL, CLICK, ENHANCED and LAST.FM sit under a CONTROL hatch below the speaker. Press the hatch: it dips in, swings up and vanishes. The slim tab under the keys closes it. The hatch state is remembered. The status window in the title display shows PAL or NTSC from the tune's header (when the header does not say, neither lights and PAL is used) and, on the row below, the SID engine in use: JS, LITE or RESID. The sub-tune counter is hidden when a tune has only one. The display itself is not interactive: sub-tunes are stepped with the SUBTUNE keys in the transport heading (or [ and ]).