The Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies with 10 SID chips

David Knapp,David Youd and Joeri van Haren created performance of The Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies From Nutcracker with synchronized playing of 10 Commodore computers  together to create with SID chips inside giving exactly 30 Voices to play the tune.

According to David Knapp this is World record performance of The Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies using 10 6581 SID chips packaged in 9 C64 and 1 C128 computers.

Lets hear how 30 voices sound on 10 Commodore 64/128 Computers 🙂

There is also another video with more visual data of each Instrument (SID chip) in David Youd video.

Technical implementation and details how did they do it can be found in The Commodore 64 Orchestrion.pdf slides.

This performance beats “The Tuneful Eight” on Ultimate64  that is capable to play on 2×4 UltiSIDs with special firmware. In demo below 2×2 UltiSIDs together with 2×2 FPGASIDs were used.

Performance on networked computer is not something new it is fair to mention that there exists also “Mahler’s first symphony by an orchestra of 12 networked ZX Spectrum computers” but it sounds awful. Realy spectrum could sound and do it better, especially ZX128 with AY-3-8912 chip.

source:The Tuneful Eight Program
source:rocketryforum.com
source:hackaday.com