Back in the day, 1982 to be exact, a company called Commodore released the 64 personal computer.  It could plug into a dedicated monitor or your TV.  You could load software by a cassette tape or hard disk.  It ruled the home computer market selling 17 million machines between ’83 and ’86 and had over 10 thousand pieces of software made for it.

One of the parts inside, made by MOS Technologies, was the SID chip for generating sound.  Even after the C64′s demise, people had a fascination with the sound, and some even went as far as to build new musical instruments with the chip, like the Elektron Sidstation and the HardSID.  There is even a project called SIDStick which is much like an ipod for .sid files.

There are numerous audio VST plugins that emulate the functionality of the SID chip.  ReFX QuadraSID, Hypersynth HyperSID, and most recently the very powerful Plogue Chipsounds.

There are various emulators that can use the .sid music files and many are listed here.

Fans of the songs have compiled a huge archive of tunes which can be found at the High Voltage SID Collection.