First thing, what makes these tracks from sc68 & sndh unique is that it’s not simple music notes, like MIDI, but rather each track actually includes the native 68000 program to play the track, and it interfaces directly to the hardware. This means that sc68 actually has to emulate enough of the Atari ST & Commodore Amiga to play music. I’ve got to say, it’s pretty impressive!

I’m using WinAmp to act as the player, so this way I just need to download the plugin from sourceforge at the moment the latest is sc68-2.2.1.exe.

On install I un-selected the winamp-3 component. I’ve tested it with 2.24 and 5.8, both working just fine.

With the plugin installed, you are good to go!

Now where to get music?

As it turns out, the sc68 project has a ‘massive’ 25MB file, sc68files_20031118.tar.gz containing some 1,775 files!

Likewise the SNDH project has downloads on their page
http://sndh.atari.org/download.php that currently sits at 75MB, and has 4,925 files!

If you look at the code, you can find that it does in fact emulate a 68000 along with peripheral chips and music chips. Just as the SNDH format is 68000 ASM.

So there we go, an obscure music format that actually involves emulation!