The Saloon

Stay current. The scene has more going on than you might think.

• CSDb — scene releases & news
• Lemon64 — community & reviews
• Breadbox64 — C64 enthusiast blog

CSDb is ground zero for what's happening in the scene — new demos, games, SID releases, cracker group activity. Updated daily. Lemon64 skews more toward nostalgia and gaming. Breadbox64 is a personal blog with deep technical dives worth bookmarking.

Forums, Discord, and wherever else the community gathers.

• Commodore 64 Discord
• Lemon64 Forums
• r/c64 — Reddit
• #C64 on Mastodon
• MiSTer FPGA Discord

The C64 Discord is active and friendly — hardware help, game discussions, BASIC sharing, all of it. Reddit r/c64 is a good place to ask questions without imposter syndrome. Mastodon's retrocomputing community has been growing steadily under #C64 and #retrocomputing.

The legends who built the machine, the software, and the culture.

• Jack Tramiel — "Computers for the masses"
• Bob Yannes — designer of the SID chip
• Al Charpentier — designer of the VIC-II chip
• Rob Hubbard — legendary SID composer

Jack Tramiel's "computers for the masses, not the classes" gave the world an affordable machine at a time when computing was expensive. Bob Yannes built the SID chip nearly alone and went on to co-found Ensoniq. Rob Hubbard's compositions defined what game music could sound like.

Where hardware and software change hands.

• eBay — Commodore 64
• C64 Collectors — Facebook Group
• Lemon64 For Sale / Wanted

eBay has volume but also speculation — sort by recent sold prices to calibrate what things actually trade for. The Lemon64 classifieds have more community trust. Always ask for a working test before paying top dollar for anything over 40 years old.

Stickers, shirts, and frontier goods — the Commodore Caverns supply wagon.

• Browse the General Store
• commodore.net — official Commodore gear

Commodore Caverns branded merch is on the way — die-cut stickers, enamel pins, t-shirts. The shelves are being stocked. For official Commodore branded gear right now, commodore.net has you covered.

20 questions. Five tiers of glory. How deep does your C64 knowledge run?

• Enter the Trivia Shootout →

Work your way from Greenhorn to Trivia Guru — each tier unlocks a fragment of forgotten C64 lore. Your best score is remembered across visits. The 20/20 club is smaller than you think.

Local chat, right here in the Saloon. Coming once the doors are properly open.

A live chat room built into the Saloon — see who else is in the caverns, swap tips, argue about which SID chip sounds better. Requires an account. Until then, the Discord and Lemon64 forums are the best watering holes around.

• Watering Hole Chat Soon
• Discord in the meantime

The MOS 6581/8580 Sound Interface Device is one of the most beloved audio chips ever made.

• SID — complete reference (C64 Wiki)
• MOS 6581 — Wikipedia

The SID has three independent voices. Each voice has four waveforms (triangle, sawtooth, pulse, noise), a full ADSR envelope, and runs through a shared analog filter — the same filter that defines the chip's character. Bob Yannes designed it in 1981 with ideas borrowed from synthesizer design, not the audio chips of the time. It shows.

Two revisions, two sonic personalities, one endless debate.

MOS 6581 — Found in early C64s (breadbin era). Runs on 12V internally. The filter is unpredictable, leaky, and varies between chips — this analog imprecision gives it a gritty, saturated character that composers exploited brilliantly. Infamous for the "digi" trick using waveform volume manipulation.

MOS 8580 — Found in C64C and later machines. Runs on 9V. The filter is more predictable and consistent. Cleaner, quieter output. Neither chip plays every SID tune "correctly" — the composer's target chip matters.

• DeepSID — choose chip model during playback

They were working within extreme constraints and made it sound like art.

• HVSC — listen to any composer's catalog
• CSDb — SID music releases

Rob Hubbard — The definitive SID composer. Commando, Monty on the Run, Thing on a Spring. Martin Galway — Ocean's house composer. Times of Lore, Parallax. Jeroen Tel — a demoscene legend still composing. Chris Hülsbeck — Turrican. The HVSC lets you explore all of them.

The easiest ways to hear SID music right now — no hardware required.

• DeepSID — browser SID player with HVSC
• HVSC — download 55,000+ SID files
• SIDplay/reSIDfp — desktop player

DeepSID is the easiest entry point — open it, browse the HVSC catalog, click play. It uses WebSID for browser-based emulation and sounds excellent. For desktop listening, SIDplay/reSIDfp uses the reSID emulation library — the most accurate software model of the chip's analog characteristics.