I for one spent many an hour playing
Nintendo’s NES console as a child, and have fond memories of the simple melodies and sound effects produced by the unit’s 2A03 sound chip. As the children of the 8-bit consoles come of age,
Chiptune music has gained in popularity, with users hacking original hardware with audio outputs and control cartridges to harness the sounds of these bygone systems, or using VST emulations to create similar sounds in software.
Plogue (makers of the
Bidule modular environment) have managed to combine the chip sounds of the C64, Nes, Vic20, Gameboy, Colecoision, Arcadia 2001, Odyssey 2, Atari 800 and Atari 2600 consoles (and even the Casio VL-Tone keyboard) into one easy to use VSTi. The interface allows up to eight chips to be sequenced at any one time, and allows the user to carry out many adjustments that would’ve previously required extensive low-level machine coding.
Particularly interesting was the development process, which involved butchering many an old console to get at the chips inside, and analysing the idiosyncrasies of the primitive circuits. Sound playback in Chipsounds is handled by the Aria engine (also responsible for playback in Garritan’s Personal Orchestra 4), which allows simulation of the electrical variation that gives chip sounds their unique character. Plogue Chipsounds currently costs around £71 from the Plogue web site.
