I tried the SwinSID Ultimate (SID 6581/8580 Replacement) by CodeKiller & Hermit and the base work by Swinkels with a Commodore 64 and the Ultimate-64 by Gideon and i must say that it works well without any problem.

The sound and the feel is good and knowing many SID tunes i did some comparisons, i can only say that these two Hungarian guys have done a Great job.

Forget immediatly how sounded the old Swinsid.

Some information taken from the SwinSID Ultimate site:

A duo from Hungary, Máté “CodeKiller” Sebők and Mihály “Hermit” Horváth have been working on improving SwinSID, originally developed by Swinkels.

List of improvements:

It has full feature compatibility with the original SID (over the old SwinSID):

• paddle/mouse support.
• readable registers (OSC3/ENV3)
• external audio in.
• bitfade.
• proper ADSR-bug support.
• fast ADSR attack rate (thanks to the self-correcting rate-counter)
• ‘Lazy Jones’ and ‘180’ -like gate and test-bit workaround (no missing note)
• proper 23bit noise-waveform calculation –> better “random” numbers.
• full 3V p-p output range w/o 1KOhm load (same as 8580)
• improved filter quality (16bit) and resonance-table for both SID model.
• improved waveform calculation (full 16 bit)
• high resolution combined waveform-tables.

It has enhancements over the original SID:

• clean anti-aliased bandlimited sound at high pitches.
• undistorted mixed digi tunes and eliminated volume-change click thanks to AC/DC separation of master volume register.
• Softconfig — software configurable options for a number of aspects of the operation.
• LEDs which intensity represents the active channels volume.
• LED displaying the active (classic) digi playback.
• or in case of the new Mahoney-digi, the entire array acts like a VU-meter.

Software configuration options:

• change between 8580/6581 behaviour (filter, ADSR, combined waveforms)
• change between PAL/NTSC pitch.
• enable/disable external audio input (less external noise)
• if enabled, then CAN be enabled to sample trough OSC3 register.
• enable/disable startup “ding”(beep)
• upload 3 banks of 256 bytes custom waveforms.
• “transparent” mute for channels — does not affect the sync, OSC3/ENV3,..

Gallery:

Download:

• SwinSID Ultimate Configurator by Schema (1546)
• SwinSID Ultimate Users Manual (1642)

SwinSID Ultimate Video: