Article from 2018. I am impressed 8-bit 48kHz audio can sound so good from a SID.
Mission
To build a C64 software player that can play a whole song at 48Khz (higher frequency than CDs’ 44.1Khz) using a stock Commodore 64 and a regular ROM cartridge, which is your typical 80s setup.
Now, there are all kinds of devilish pieces of hardware available for your Commodore 64 nowadays, such as 16Mb RAM Expansion Units, or even mp3 hardware players. Of course, this stuff was not around in the 80s, and it therefore does not appeal to purists. In other words, any reliance on these monstrosities would get me disqualified. You might as well run a marathon riding a motorbike.
The largest “legitimate” ROM Cartridges are those that Ocean used for their games. You can store a whopping one megabyte of data onto them. We are going to need all of it!
In Numbers
So, we are playing 8-bit samples at 48Khz from one megabyte of storage, minus few Kbytes for the actual player code. This leaves us with 48Kb to encode one second of uncompressed audio, and means that the whole cartridge can barely contain 20 seconds of audio. Which means that we must implement some form of compression, ideally at least 4:1 to get close to 1m30 sec of audio.####
Commodore 64’s CPU runs at roughly 1Mhz. This means that, if we want to play 48000 samples per second, we only have about 100000/48000 = 21 CPU clock cycles per sample.
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