hello! some of you may know i've been working on a big, comprehensive guide to making hardware authentic chiptunes for the Super Nintendo! well, it's finally available to read!!

HERE IS THE GUIDE, CHECK IT OUT

(URL redirects to a Google Doc)

my goal for the guide is to familiarize anyone with the musical features of the SPC700 soundchip and how to utilize those features in the two most fully-featured tools available, C700 VST and SNESMOD (.it to .spc converter). it is intended to be as friendly to newcomers as possible. the focus is entirely on creating music - a composer's guide for composers, because i found that the extant SNES resources are fairly technical and developer-focused.

the guide is set up as follows - a brief introduction and comparison of the two tools, thorough guides (w/ examples) for setting up + using C700 and SNESMOD, and a section on ripping and handling SNES samples... plus a repository of all my video game sample rips thus far (from my YEA VIDEOGAME series).

notably for SNESMOD users/prospective users, DEFENSE MECHANISM helped me put together a definitive package that contains all the available drivers, from the original "lite" to the newer forks created by AugustusBlkheart and KungFuFurby. the version that was going around before contained a seemingly nonfunctional copy of the "supernofx" and "celes" converter. defmech has blessedly fixed that by compiling it himself!!
>> for convenience's sake, you can download this new SNESMOD collection here

please let me know what you think, and i sincerely hope that you find this useful!!! one thing i've noticed time and again is that because there's no big definitive chiptune tool for the SNES like the NES's FamiTracker, the point of entry can be very overwhelming for newcomers, unsure of which imperfect tool to choose. it is my firm wish to change that. if anything doesn't make sense, could be improved upon, or seems inaccurate, don't hesitate to let me know. feel free to share it also.

thanks, love u all

P.S. i am going to host more SNES format battles again now that this is out, so get ready : )

excellent documentation indeed (that should be available at the lyceum as well) - but... why did i get used to snesgss instead?... (at least up to now...)

HUUUUUUGGEEEEE THANK YOU for this! Will be giving this a deep read and am extremely excited to make some tunes in the style that I grew up listening to

Oh crap! Thanks so much for your effort on this. I'll be making use of it for sure

really awesome stuff, thank you so much for making this!!!

however, i eagerly await the day SNEStracker evolves enough that you have to revise this >:)

is 2022 the year a64 finna make a snes track

if you want to see a demo of some of the C700 stuff in action, i did an interview on stream with Button Masher where we spent quite a bit of time looking at some songs made with it (Super Islands entries), and the VST itself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AivN8C0zZiQ&t=270s

dang, if only this post existed when super islands was still on i could have actually posted my track. anyways thank you so much for this!

as i think @ItsDuv seems to be suggesting here, can we request a "Super Islands II" major soon? ;)

Alas, I too never got to make a track on Super Islands. I find using the SNES music tools difficult.