Poll: Who likes chip music?

Actually it's another Grey Alien poll combined with thoery.

My theory is that most people who like chip music had an 8 or 16 bit computer (actually when I say 8bit I really mean C64 as you can't really say Spectrums had good music haha) and therefore are probably over 25 (or 20 at least). I'm not to sure many of the younger generation can get into it as it has no nostalgia value for them, but I could be wrong. After mobiles got past the BEEP stage lots of them had chip music type ring tones but things have moved on again since - this may have converted a few youngsters (or not).

I myself am 30, had a C64/Amiga(500/1200) and like chip music (a lot). What about you? (just post 8/16bit computers as proof of age if not wanting to share age).

Lets go!

Well i had an Atari 2600 and vic 20, and i find chip music a load of rubish!. Btw, I am 28.

Well, I had a speccy but still love chip music. Don't forget all those classic arcade games that had it! ;)

"load of rubish" lol. OK that's 50/50 to my theory.

I don't like chiptunes. Depends on the system btw.. for my own MSX there are quite some sound-extensions available, so some of the classic chip-artifacts (arpeggio etc.) aren't required to create something decent.

Some 'chip'-tunes made by Konami on MSX (Metal Gear for example) are quite decent however.. but it was true 3-channel music, not some uberhacked music format which tried to act like more than 3 channels. (yes I really don't like arpeggios :P)

Love chip music, had a Spectrum and a friend with a C64. I actually did love Spectrum music too - some games did some really funky things with it (Trantor, Agent X - and the +3 had a really distinctive sound)

I love almost all the "good" tunes from the C64 era. And when I say good, I mean from the respected composers who made many of the more memorable ones.

Im 26, and had C64 and Amiga 600.

Had a spectrum, loved the music then still do. And as Big10p
said don´t forget those who cut their teeth in the arcades :)

And regardless of your particular bias, don´t slag off the Spectrum, because to some of us it was a religion, okay?

I should think so too.

Amen. :)

I'm 28 and listen to chiptunes almost every day. Have these "shower-mix" cd's crammed with goodies I put on every morning. After this little morning ritual (plus cig'n'coffee) I'm ready for anything.

Oh, and I had a C64 way back when.

I assume you're talking sythesised music generated by a chip rather than samples.

Chip music had it's day, when you needed to squeeze 4 minutes of music into 1k it was great. The C64 had a great little synth chip on board, however, you hear it now and it just sounds rubbish. The Spectrum performed some amazing acrobatics to get more than one channel playing at the same time which was stunning at the time, certainly from a coding technology point of view.

The music is still good (as it the notes that were played) but the sound is dreadful. I remember having The Big Demo on the ST which took a load of C64 tunes and used samples to beef them up and they were fantastic.

The Amiga had some great music, however, that was all samples so that's hardly chip music is it. After all it's just playing back something created externally. Which is exactly what playing an MP3 is. Likewise midi tracks are just samples being played back so that doesn't count either.

I remember when I first heard some of that multi-channel music on the speccy - just amazing. See, the humble speccy didn't have a sound chip so sending a signal to speaker stopped the CPU from doing anything else. So, to get a game running while playing a tune was a feat in itself. To have a game running with simulated, multi-channel music playing was taking the p*ss! :)

I like it. The theme to 'Glider Rider' was an especially memorable one. Nostalgia is definitely part of the story.

I certainly wouldn't stick one on my mp3 player. But some of them (and I must stress some) were pretty good.

AshMantle: You mean Hubbard, Tel, Whitaker, Daglish + many more of course. I think Tel was my favourite.

To all speccy fans, don't get me wrong, my first computer was a 48K rubber-keyed spec and it was GREAT. Loved it to bits but lets face it, compared to the C64, the music/sound was TOTAL pants and the graphic had colour clash. When it died, I replaced it with a C64, but kept programming my friends +2 and another friends +3 (converting stuff to disk).

Rob: The amiga did have some real chip music as well as modules (which I love too).

My dad had a spectrum. It loaded tapes for ages and you could turn on the screeching sound. I remember playing a little black car on yellow background game. We used a projector to show it on my wall, the wall im sitting next to right now. I guess i can only remember the "brrrr" sound, so im not sure if it had any music. There may have been other games but this 1 was most impressive! I played it only once or twice tho :( i now actually think he just borrowed the spectrum from someone from work to play with it (and to impress me, now look what he's done!). Maybe a speccy was an oddity in those days in Yugoslavia (about 1989) so he was proud to have it in the house. The keyboard was the COOLEST, it was smaller and had rubber keys. I want a keyboard like that now, why do they all make $hite plastic and solid keyboards nowdays...

But... the first music i started liking was from my GameBoy. It was chip music of some sort, wasnt it? I remember putting on a tetris game and pausing it and putting the GB to my ear and listening to it.

Lenn: I used those rubber keys for years and they were horrid. Programming basic was weird as all the keywords were written underneath each key and you had to press a special key and then the keyword key and it would auto-type out in full!

I love chip music. I had one C64, one C128, one Atari ST and one Amiga 1200. And I am 24

I think it has its place, there was quite a bit of it on the Amiga, some of it was pretty cool - just an alternative kind of `sound`.

It depends on the piece of music -- sometimes it's much better than having no music at all, sometimes it's plain and simply awful...

But from a quality point I think they rarely match or surpass 'real' music... Kind of a necesary evil due to the huge size constraints back in the mid-80's, but little reason to exist anymore in this day and age.

Grey: I could be wrong, but the amiga 'chip' music was simply very short low quality samples, I don't think the amiga sound chip was capable of generating it's own sounds, you could generate samples at run time (much like procedual textures) for example sine waves, square waves, noise etc, this would sound like chip music but in reality it was just playing samples.

As I said, I don't think Amiga music should be classed as chip music.

I love chip music, lots of quality CPC64 and C64 tunes. I like the sound of chip music, a lot of techno and hard trance use those style of grainy screeches. Infact remixes of old chip tunes are usually worse in my opinion because it doesn't feature the actual instruments used in the old classic tune. :)

Had an Atari 2600, Speccy, C64, C128, Amiga 500, Amiga 1200 and now PC & Mac.

IMO todays game music doesn't even come close to the quality of the SID chip. I mean sure you have orchestras and new age sounds in todays games but nothing compares to the quality, clarity and downright awesomeness of C64 game music.

Come on now fellas, would you rather listen to all the crap produced today or listen to the C64 to it's thing?

I prefer not to listen to:
- crap produced today
- 'good' chiptunes from the 80's

I prefer to listen to
- good stuff created today

If today's music sounds bad then it's because of some lame-ass composer who can't handle lots of resources. Creating a clear musical theme, the classic way, is an almost forgotten art.

When I heard the theme tune for Rambo on the C64...that was a jaw dropping moment, the sound was so rich compared to anything I had heard before.

Of course compared to todays sounds the old chip music pales in comparison but it is still nice to hear them if only for 'nostaligic' reasons.

I'm 26 and was around for the Amiga era, as a consequence I detest synth chip music and love sample chip music.

I recommend http://netilium.org/~mad/markvii/ for those into hybrid stuff.

That makes 2 of us then - although I started with a VIC 20.

not really, it was adequate for the time, but I never really look back and miss the music. And the few times I have heard it, I tend to turn it down quick.

34, C64->Amiga, love chip music.

Atari 2600 -> Vic 20 -> C64 -> C64 later version -> A500 -> A1200 -> A600

The Atari 2600 was stolen. Vic 20 got given to my cousin who I then wrote an adventure game for because she couldn't complete the Scott Adams ones. Can't remember what happened to my first C64. The second one fritzed one day and destroyed the PSU.

A500 was given to same cousin as the Vic 20, which was returned to me and then sold for £20 to a mate.

A1200 and A600 coexisted for some time, with the A600 doing very little (I got it virtually given to me).

A1200 received a 50MHz 68030 upgrade, 16MB of RAM and then a 50MHz 68882 FPU. It got repainted in red (including all the keys) and then I got a PC and haven't really touched an Amiga since.

Don't know where my A1200 is, probably in the loft of a family member. I know I threw out my 400 floppies.

Nowadays, I've got the complete TOSEC collection of Amiga software and UAE which runs faster than any Amiga ever did (i.e. can play Alien Breed 3D 2 fairly smooth in fullscreen). Also a full MAME 0.100 collection, C64, Spectrum, Atari 2600, Vic-20 (VICE is great) plus a not small number of SNES, Megadrive, SMS and gameboy games.

Not that I have time to play any of the games ;)

C64 chip tunes owns !

Amiga didn't have much chip-music, like 99% of all Amiga music are sampled instruments...

Rob: You are right of course, but the point is even mini samples created at runtime sound EXACTLY the same as chip music and thus I would call them chip music, esp. as they were so small (4K etc). I only really heard AMiga chip music on demos, not on any commercial games.

Thing is with chip music is, sure there is plenty of crap, but there is also some literally GENIUS stuff that has it all, Bass sounds, composition, amazing lead noises and TOTALLY memorable melodies e.g. Cybernoid II, Monty on the Run, Thing on a Spring ... I could go on for a long time! I have download some great chip music "style" (for Rob) mods from ModArchive.com and they are a pleasure to listen to every time, simply brilliantly done, a combination of music "programming" and excellent musicianship! I filtered out a lot of crap to get to the good ones mind you.

vinyl. What's TOSEC, is that the whole Amiga lot? Slightly illegal, but uh just as matter of interest, where u get? Did you use my Gamebase64 collector to get the whole 64 bunch? Also, purely for research purposes, how did you uh ... get all the MAME stuff, obviously you own ALL the cabinets or ROM boards in a warehouse the size of a football pitch ;-) btw ... have you managed to get Vice or WinUAE running perfectly smooth scrolling at 50Hz or perhaps 100Hz?

love chip music, but didn't have really old systems... well.. my dad had an atari 800 xl, with frogger... but that was a like.. once a year thing we took out... I love old NES tunes tho... thats my fix.

but i think i would have liked chip sound anyway tho.. cause I like stuff that I never was exposed to... I like the clean sound of it, with the lack of performance. It is like a pure form of music playing.... or something... I'm not really thinking too clearly.. watching family guy

I have to say that game music has hit rock bottom these days. When can you last remember an awesome soundtrack within a computer game?

Many of my all time favourite games just happened to have awsome soundtracks too.

Gfx date easily but music never dates ever, even gameplay dates as games. Nostalgia can recall your fondest memories of a game, even if the game is no longer any good and really outdated. Ie Outrun

I can remember playing SOnic 1 and 2 and Streets OF Rage 2 on the Megadrive, then came the MEgaCD, WOW awesome CD quality soundtracks. I couldn't believe how great game music was, and now since PS2, game music is terrible.

It's like game music comes the very bottom of the list now, just behind gameplay and originality, gfx are king. That's all that seems to matter these days.

And then you've got companies like EA games putting 'real' music in games and ruining the game industry further with their already bland as it is software. It sometimes makes me want to go postal.

Two words: David Whittacker.

The problem of modern days is that creating music is cheap and very accessable. The amount of composers keeps rising, and all 100.000 composer want those 100 jobs. It can happen that not the best composer wins the job, but the one with the biggest mouth or the best negotiator (or the cheapest one?). In a way this degrades the average level of quality.

Becky: I mentioned Whittaker already and also Hubbard, Jeroen Tel, and Daglish but others worthy of mention are Mark Cooksey, Jonathan Dunn (late Ocean Loaders!), Tim Follin, Matt Furniss, Martin Galway (early Ocean Loaders), Shaun Southern, Martin Walker. Some EPIC stuff between them!

I always put my iPod on shuffle when I cycle to work. Whenever a C64 tune comes on (I converted quite a few to mp3), especially The Last Ninja 2, it makes me cycle faster. It's an amazing sound when used right, especially to us in our early 30s.

Golden Sun and Everybody's Golf on psp come to mind. Granted, the Everybody's Golf music isn't absolutely killer but I thought it was very good. Quality game music still pops up now and again, mostly from the japs though I admit.

Yes, but you where only speaking for you :) !

fair enough :-)

Grey Alien:

TOSEC is really about a naming convention for ROMS (well, disk images etc). The whole TOSEC gives you many duplicates of games and apps (normal versions, trained versions, cracked releases etc).

I got the MAME collection from the same place as my Amiga collection. It would be daft for me to mention the website here, so I wont.

The C64 stuff I had on DVD from about 2 years ago. I daresay that I'm missing some, but I haven't accessed the DVD's in a while.

Likewise all my other stuff is on DVD and is of varying ages. I just haven't time to keep up to date with everything. I will probably not update MAME past 0.100 now, due to me disagreeing with the MAMEDev team philosophy (and execution thereof).

I didn't use your tool for downloading the C64 stuff (though I know it exists ;) ).

WinUAE runs at 720x576 50Hz on my PC, though ISTR that I set up that mode using nVidia's control panel thingy.

It sucks to run it at that res on a 19" monitor because 50Hz is really flickery. 100Hz is nicer, but you lose that 'authentic' touch.

I wonder what half of those composers are doing these days.

Vinylpusher, you're not posting in the right thread are you? :)

vinyl: I have an email address ;-) I mentioned the 100Hz mode (in WinUAE) because it's double to 50Hz and so should result in smooth scrolling. However, my video card won't do 50Hz (at all) and the 100Hz mode doesn't seem to stick in full screen mode, it keeps reverting to Default. I'm jealous you can get it working at 50Hz, does the scrolling look TOTALLY smooth?

I love them! Still can't forget my old "ZX128"!!!

Grey: P2P is your friend - I recommend www.shareaza.com

ENAY: Last post-Amiga days soundtrack that I ever went nuts over was SSX, before that was the Command and Conquer series.

ALL: Everything Tim Follin related can be found here : the follin drome.

Vanilla: cool site. (follin)

On PC I can even remember the early games having great soundtracks like Doom1/2, Duke Nukem, Dune 2, Warcraft I and 2 etc. With AWE it was awesome.

Yeah AWE, improved midi must have sounded cool on Doom!

Yes, all those games sounded awesome, especially Duke Nukem and Warcraft 1. Sounded well tinny on 16bit soundblaster. Ugh!

Doom was definitely good on awe, very heroic and action packed.

I loved some of the chip music on the Amiga. The Lemmings cracktro was probably the weirdest, but I can still remember it to this day :)

Skid Row used to do some good chip tunes with their intros and The Black Lotus... well, they didn't do chip music but their MODs were top notch :D

If you want to hear cool Doom music, download Classic Doom for Doom 3. They have done some great re-makes of the old Doom tunes (it's also a really fun game to play, better than Doom 3 itself!).

Enay, as I mention earlier, these PC games that use General MIDI are just playing samples, there's no real time synth stuff going on here, it's just a bunch of samples being played in sequence. The AWE even made the samples more visible by having downloadable sound fonts. Again, to reitereate, these in the grand scheme of things are no more chip music than playing an MP3. They're just using more shorter samples and pitch shifting them around.

vinylpusher: Thanks for the Classic Doom tip! Downloading now!

Rob: Yeah those games aren't chip at all, they must have diverted the thread on purpose ... saboteurs!

I loved chip tunes back then and still love them now. I'm 32 now but I'm not sure if I'd like them if I had missed out on the Vic20 / C64 etc.

Someone mentioned above about the Amiga not being able to do chip tunes? - MED & OctaMED both had chip tune abilities, you used sine wave, saw etc. Perhaps they were generated on the fly, I don't know.

I don't think he's 100% right either. With the likes of Soundtracker and Protracker then, yeah, you had to use small samples and I *think* (memory struggling here) with OctaMED you could doodle into a buffer or use some pre-set waveforms to get chip-ish parps out of the thing (which you may or may not consider cheating). Whether this is what is happening in Battle Squadron (which uses a custom format which sounds decidedly synthesized) I couldn't say, but I definitely remember a demo of a music editor that made a big fuss about being synth-based... mostly as my A1200 couldn't quite cope with the strain during the more ambitious tracks. Lord only knows what it was called, though.

There's no argument, however, that most "chip" tunes on the Miggy fall into the very first category. Would it blur the lines too much to mention that both the C64 and MegaDrive would mix (badly) sampled drums in with their synth channels on occasion and everyone seemed to find it more cool than heretical? Speaking of which, the MegaDrive was probably the last popular home gaming machine to deliver "pure" kick-ass chip music: It doesn't get much better than Gunstar Heroes... [digs out the .gym file] ...$&@#ing $&@#itty $&@#!

The music for Hellfire on the Megadrive was excellent, I seem to remember. In fact, the whole game was a virtually perfect clone of the original arcade game.

Sledge: Good point about samples being used on the C64. When I originally said Chip music at the top of this thread I wasn't expecting it to get so technical (doh haha) I just really meant that genre of music that *sound* like "chip music" thus can include some mods that have a chip music feel rather than a mod using samples feel.

Yep what Rob (and I erlier) said, and to sum up :

* C64 > 99% Chip music
* Amiga < 2-3% Chip music (rest of the bunch are samples)
* PC < 1% Chip music (what most THINK are chip are really MIDI)

wedoe: I would hazard a guess that the number of chip tunes on the Amiga was quite high. Virtually every scene group produced dozens of chip tunes for ther cracktros and trainers. They had to be small in size in order that they could squeeze them into 1 or 2 tracks on a floppy.

Rob, I know there's a difference but I like both :) Sampled chip music is still good and even then many certainly made sounds which are unique in their own right when reverbed correctly.

I was just saying that game music is crap these days.

Heh, I've also got Gunstar Heroes .gym files too :) You should check out Dynamite Headdy, also by Treasure.

Well here you go then : http://members.dodo.com.au/~tzuyd/skid_row_lemmings_tro.mod


Most of the tunes in their 'tros were ripped from other sources, but they sure knew how to pick 'em.


I believe you're thinking of THX, now named AHX for legal reasons. I think they have a PC version now and a very kickass plugin for Winamp exists.

Seeing as we're on the subject I did a remake of the Sanxion Loader tune by Robb Hubbard, you can download it off my site: http://www.mentalillusion.co.uk/downloads.php

I made a point of using very retro sounds so I think it sounds pretty good... but hey... I would! And I cheesed it up big time with whoops and yeahs!

SidPlay has a central place on my desktop, nuff said.