Most people who write Commodore 64 music today do it on a modern computer. SID-Wizard goes the other way. It is a tracker that loads from a C64 disk and runs on the machine itself, written in 6502 assembly language and first released in 2012, thirty years after the computer came out. Its manual is a text file designed so that “it can be read on real C64 as well”.
Its author is Hermit, the Hungarian coder and musician Mihály Horváth. He released version 1.0 as a release candidate at the Árok 2012 demo party on 7 July 2012, and the finished 1.0 on 31 August. He was still releasing new versions in 2026.
Fast facts
- Author: Hermit (Mihály Horváth), of Samar Productions, SIDRIP Alliance and Singular.
- First release: 1.0 RC, 7 July 2012, at Árok 2012; 1.0, 31 August 2012.
- Runs on: a Commodore 64. Since 2022 also on Linux, Windows and macOS through its own emulator.
- Chips: one SID, with versions for two, three and (from 1.92) four.
- Exports: SID files for players and archives, and C64 executables.
- Licence: free. SourceForge lists it as public domain; Hermit’s own notice says anyone may do what they like with the code, though a mention “would still be nice”.
A tracker for a synthesiser
The SID is a three-voice synthesiser: each voice picks from four waveforms, has its own attack-decay-sustain-release envelope, and can be sent through a shared filter. A C64 tune is a program that rewrites those registers many times a second. SID-Wizard organises that work the way other trackers do, with patterns of notes and effects arranged in an order list, but its instruments are small programs of their own. Each one has its own tables for waveform and arpeggio, pulse width and filter, which the player steps through frame by frame, and its own “hard restart” setting, the technique C64 musicians use to make each new note start cleanly.
Hermit’s manual credits the programs he learned from: “I took many ideas from the best C64 music editors like Goattracker, SDI, X-SID, SID-Factory, JCH Editor”. Its feature list is long. It gives 36 instruments, 8 subtunes and 100 patterns of up to 250 bytes each; vibrato and slides calculated by the player; a chord table; keyboard tracking, which changes the filter with the pitch of the note; up to eight updates of the SID per video frame; a one-step undo; 324 example instruments; and alternative tunings, Verdi tuning and just intonation among them.
The player comes in sizes. At the start a composer chooses “Normal”, “Medium”, “Light”, “Extra”, “Bare” or “Demo”, trading features for memory and processor time. A demo or game has to fit its music into what the graphics code leaves over, so the manual lists exactly what each smaller player gives up: “Light” drops the calculated vibrato and the chord table, and “Bare” has no subtunes at all.
MIDI and multiple SIDs
SID-Wizard takes notes from a MIDI keyboard through a range of period C64 MIDI interfaces, from Sequential and Passport to Datel and Siel, and through HerMIDI, an interface Hermit designed himself and released in 2014. Its companion program SWMconvert converts tunes to and from MIDI and FastTracker XM files, and a GoatTracker importer brings in tunes from that PC-based C64 tracker.
The two-, three- and four-SID versions write for C64s fitted with extra SID chips, giving six, nine or twelve voices.
On a modern computer
In 2022 a user called Chabee asked Hermit for a version that ran directly on a PC, with shorter loading times and none of the quirks of D64 disk images. Hermit had recently written his own SID emulator, cRSID, and a C64 emulator, FlexSID, and it took him “only about 3 weeks of work to create this emulator specifically for SID-Wizard”. The result, SID-Wizard Emulator, released on 20 June 2022, runs the C64 program itself inside a small emulator window, reads the host computer’s folders as if they were disks, and adds PC MIDI input. Later versions added a text-mode interface for terminals and, in 2026, a piano-roll view and players that can run from ROM.
At first Hermit kept the emulator’s source to himself, writing that it was “not very well polished or structured, so I prefer not to share it to the public”. The 1.97 release, in June 2026, is published with its sources and examples. The C64 program’s source had been public from the start: the project’s SourceForge repository opened on 8 July 2012, the day after the first release. In 2016 Hermit left SourceForge and moved his work to his own site and CSDb, the Commodore scene database.
The music goes where C64 music usually goes. Hermit’s change log for versions 1.0 to 1.2 records a fix to the exporter because otherwise the High Voltage SID Collection “won’t accept the export”: that is the archive that has collected SID music since 1996 (see the chiptune scene).
Sources
- CSDb, release entries for SID-Wizard v1.0 RC (7 July 2012, released at Árok 2012), v1.0 (31 August 2012), SID-Wizard Emulator (20 June 2022) and 1.97 (24 June 2026, with source, Windows, Linux and macOS downloads) (database, web, secondary). https://csdb.dk/release/?id=109698
- CSDb, scener entry for Hermit (database, web, secondary): groups, country (Hungary), release list including SID-Wizard versions and HerMIDI (2014). https://csdb.dk/scener/?id=18806
- Hermit, SID-Wizard 1.9 User Manual (C64 version), in the 1.97 release: the ideas taken from other editors, the feature list, the instrument tables, the player types, MIDI interfaces, the manual readable on a C64.
- Hermit, SID-Wizard Emulator 1.97 User Manual and README, 2026: the request from Chabee, cRSID and FlexSID, “about 3 weeks of work”, the source withheld at first, the text interface and piano-roll view, his name and licence notice.
- Hermit, SID-Wizard change log, in the 1.97 release: the export fix for the High Voltage SID Collection (1.0 to 1.2 additions).
- SID-Wizard project page, SourceForge (web, secondary): description, licence listed as public domain, and the note that the project moved away in March 2016; the Subversion repository’s first commit, 8 July 2012. https://sourceforge.net/projects/sid-wizard/