Chiptune

Chiptune has always oddly intrigued me. The fact that many computers and consoles at the time had unique sound chips lead to unique capabilities and produced tracks.

Game Boy

While I started my chiptune experiments with trackers like Famitracker, I really fell in love with the simplicity of the original Nintendo Game Boy.

The Game Boy's sound chip allows for four simultaneous monophonic sounds at once:

1. Square 1
2. Square 2
3. Wave
4. Noise

The two square channels have adjustable duty, which make them great for melodies, and the noise channel is perfect for chip drums, but the wave channel is where you can really create some complex synths.

Having such hard set limitations with what is available to you really forces you to be as creative as possible, and I really love that about the Game Boy.

Software like LSDJ and mGB and hardware projects like the ArduinoBoy really help to bring the most out of this device.

LSDJ

LSDJ allows for such an awesome sound and song creation environment and UI, that new projects such as the Dirywave M8 are still adopting it decades later.

mGB and the ArduinoBoy Pro

Another really cool modern use for the Game Boy is via a hardware project called the ArduinoBoy coupled with a piece of software called mGB

This setup allows the Game Boy (DMB, Color, GBA/SP) to become a Midi instrument that can be controlled via a dedicated MIDI controller or DAW!

Depending on the Game Boy you use, you'll get access to different channels of the respective sound chip, controllable on different MIDI channels. The DMG has an added bonus of having a 5th MIDI channel that allows for 3-voice polyphony by using the three melodic channels together. allowing

The source code for mGB wouldn't build with my modern Linux OS, so I forked it. The build worked as recently as March 2022 and can be found here: TonyTwoStep/mGB

Chiptune Demos

TODO