Almost all Commodore 64 music was written to play inside a program. To listen to Rob Hubbard’s music for Monty on the Run you loaded the game and sat on its title screen. The High Voltage SID Collection (HVSC) takes the music out. Its volunteers “rip” each tune from the game, demo or music disk it came in: they find the player routine and the music data in the C64’s memory and save them as a small .sid file that a player program can run on its own. Then they find out who wrote it. The collection began in 1996 with about 4,000 tunes. In June 2026 its 85th update took it past 61,000.
Before HVSC
Ripped C64 music had been passed around for years before the collection began. Jan Harries, a ripper known as Rambones, told the diskmag SIDin in 2004 how it started. In 1990 Per Håkan Sundell and Ron Birk released a demo for the Amiga, The 100 Most Remembered C64 Tunes, with a built-in emulation of the C64’s SID chip. In 1991 they followed it with PlaySID, an Amiga player that came with about 300 tunes. Harries began transferring his own rips to PlaySID and released eight packs of them, called Ripp Off, between 1991 and 1995. A collector known as Nemesis1 then gathered the released packs into one collection, the NemeSIDs, which, Harries said, was not good at working out who had composed the tunes.
The Shark’s merger
The HVSC started in May 1996, when “The Shark decided to merge many SID collections available on the Internet into one big collection”, Peter Sandén of the HVSC crew told Retro Gamer in 2004. “The previous SID collections contained many bugged SIDs, repeats, and inaccurate credits. They were also highly disorganised.” The Shark, of the C64 group INC, whom Harries names as David Greiman, was about to release a PC equivalent of the NemeSIDs for Michael Schwendt’s SIDPLAY, a SID player for the PC. Harries added his 1,364 rips and joined The Shark, Schwendt and BOD/Talent as co-authors. The first release, HVSC #1, came out on 12 July 1996.
According to the collection’s own documentation, the name came from an early agreement with the makers of the High Voltage CDs, compilations of C64 games and demos, one of whom was a member of the HVSC crew for a while.
Ripping, fixing and crediting
Once the collections were merged, the crew noticed how many famous tunes were missing and began searching C64 software archives for more to rip. Credits were the next problem. The collection’s documentation, which repeats Sandén’s account almost word for word, describes finding “a music credited to a famous composer yet the style of the music was completely different than his normal style. One sure way of solving these mysteries was to contact the original composers.” The Shark wrote to many of them by email, Harries recalled, “and we got a lot of tunes that had never been released before.”
The collection’s rules for contributors come down, in its own words, to “VERIFY and STANDARDISE”. A report that a rip is bugged has to be checked by loading the original on a real C64, and every credit change has to be confirmed with the composer or with the software as it was released. In 2004 Sandén explained that when Simon White’s Sidplay2, a player that emulates the C64 cycle by cycle, arrived, many old rips stopped working in it, and the crew set a new goal of making every rip work on a real C64.
The crew itself changed over the years. Stephan Schmid, known as Steppe, told Lotek64 in 2004 that he had bombarded the team with rips from demos, was invited to join after about 1,000 of them, and after a year took over running the HVSC from Harries. By then the crew had twelve members, Sandén said, plus outside contributors.
Updates and numbers
The HVSC grows in updates. Each one is a package of new and fixed files that an update tool applies to an existing copy, first written by The Shark and later developed by Michael Schwendt, LaLa and Simon White. SIDin’s news pages, and the collection’s own site, show how fast it grew:
| Release | Date | SID files |
|---|---|---|
| HVSC #1 | 12 July 1996 | about 4,000 |
| HVSC 5.0 (update 32) | 17 August 2002 | about 18,616 |
| HVSC 5.2 (update 34) | 21 December 2002 | 20,325, after the biggest update so far: 1,009 new tunes |
| Update 38 | 21 February 2004 | past 25,000 |
| HVSC #42 | June 2005 | 30,001 |
| HVSC #75 | 12 July 2021 | more than 54,000 |
| HVSC #84 | 25 December 2025 | 60,572 |
| HVSC #85 | 28 June 2026 | more than 61,000 |
HVSC 5.0 moved the collection to a revised file format, PSIDv2NG, whose header can record whether a tune plays on a real C64, whether it was written for PAL or NTSC machines, and which of the two SID chips, the 6581 or the 8580, it was composed on. The next update, in October 2002, added what SIDin called “the real rip”: RSID files, the format for rips made to run as they would on a real C64. Until 2005 releases carried version numbers such as 5.9; from #42 each release took the number of its update, “to find out which update you need in order to upgrade”, as the release notes put it. Since December 2019 an update has come out every June or July and every December.
How the collection is arranged
HVSC sorts its tunes by composer, under the composer’s surname or, when it is better known, their scene handle. A composer gets a directory of their own under /MUSICIANS/ once the collection holds three of their tunes, a rule introduced with #42. Game and demo tunes by composers with fewer than three tunes, and those whose composers are still unknown, go in /GAMES/ and /DEMOS/. /DOCUMENTS/ holds the collection’s own texts, including a song-length database, complete from 2005, that tells players how long each tune lasts, and the STIL, the SID Tune Information List. The STIL is a text file of notes and background on individual tunes, which a STIL administrator compiles for each update from what contributors send in.
Copyright
The collection says plainly that it does not own the music. “All of the tunes available in the High Voltage SID Collection (HVSC) are copyrighted,” its documentation begins, and the crew “do not have (and neither do they claim) the legal authority to grant licences”. Some tunes appear with the explicit permission of High Technology Publishing, which administers the rights on behalf of their composers, and the documentation points anyone who wants to use a tune commercially to Chris Abbott, who made the Back in Time CDs of remixed C64 music. Sandén told Retro Gamer that copyright problems had been minor ones: some composers “were unhappy at first but we eventually worked out a better relationship”, and most were happy to see their old work preserved.
Listening to it
A .sid file is not a recording. It is the tune’s own C64 code, which a player program runs through an emulated SID chip, so the music can be heard on almost any computer. In 2000 a Californian radio DJ told GO64! that his SID show “wouldn’t be possible without the High Voltage SID Collection”. Players include the SIDPLAY family and the vsid player that comes with the VICE emulator, and the files can also be transferred to a real Commodore 64 and played there.
The HVSC also made new projects possible. Harries estimated in 1993 that there were about 10,000 C64 tunes to rip; by 2004 the collection held more than 25,000, which he credited partly to GameBase64 and the other projects preserving C64 software. New C64 music is added too: demo party competitions, scene releases and tunes written with modern trackers such as GoatTracker.
Sources
- Retro Gamer issue 4, 2004: feature on C64 music, and interview with Peter Sandén of the High Voltage SID Collection (its start in May 1996, The Shark, the problems with earlier collections, contacting composers, Sidplay2 and real-C64 rips, the STIL, copyright).
- SIDin issue 6, 8 May 2004: interview with Jan Harries (Rambones) on PlaySID, Ripp Off, the NemeSIDs, The Shark of INC and the founding team; news of update 38 and the 25,000 mark.
- SIDin issues 1 (21 September 2002), 2 (21 November 2002), 3 (7 February 2003) and 8 (30 July 2005): news of HVSC 5.0 and PSIDv2NG, update 33 and RSID, update 34, HVSC 5.9 and HVSC #42 (the new numbering, the song-length database, the three-tune rule).
- Lotek64 issue 9, March 2004 (in German): interview with Stephan Schmid (Steppe), who took over running the HVSC from Jan Harries.
- GO64!, June 2000: interview with a Californian radio DJ who played SID music.
- High Voltage SID Collection website (web, secondary): news of updates #72 to #85, 2019–2026, including #75 on the collection’s 25th anniversary; “The High Voltage SID Collection” documentation (copyright notice, the name, the HVSC philosophy, collection structure); FAQ (PSIDv2NG); download page (the update tools). https://www.hvsc.c64.org/