I know this topic has been done to death, but I’m doing it again.

Recently I’ve been added to the media team at Chiptune Cafe, meaning I’m assisting with bringing back the blog. For my first article I thought it’d be fun to survey people on what they defined as chiptune, and where they drew the line between chiptune music and… not chiptune music.

This is not so much a discussion thread as much as you just post what you think. You also might be quoted in my article!

My honest definition would probably be something like, you know NES and C64 music? Stuff like that.

A more rigorous definition would be something like, music performed in real time (i.e. not a recording) by a computer with very limited audio capabilities, which has been written around those limitations. This would be the purist core, and around this you can add the periphery - music made by emulators of said hardware, or by trackers with similar limitations, or made to resemble the core chiptunes in aesthetic.

A form of music that is kind of chiptunish is electro-acoustic music, which uses either intentional instruments (e.g. a computer-controlled player piano) or experimental/repurposed ones (disk drives, Tesla coils). Culturally though, I think it's a separate hobby from the chiptune scene.

prepare for the ramblings of a lunatic



if it can be played back on hardware that we consider old enough to consider "chiptune" (zx, nes, snes, pc98, possibly n64?), whether because its emulated or something, its chiptune

if its made in a daw but adheres to limitations so closely it could be recreated on hardware near perfectly, its...psuedobit? idk what name to call this, blame beepbox mod users. i do think it can sorta fit under the umbrella...possibly.

stuff like s3xmodit - besides .mod itself - is probably a grey area for me given the amount of channels and sample quality you can get.
_{(i should probably mention that i have NO idea what s3xmodits are played on besides the "soundblaster/adlib" but idk what limits that has...)}

limitations aren't real in "s3xmit", and limitations are kinda what makes chiptune chiptune
without that, you kinda are just...composing....in a weird daw
and you'll probably be using an external daw for the samples...that will be of the same quality in your tracker format. that you can have several of.
"oh but you can't use reverb and vsts and sf2s like chiptune" you can bake it into the sample.

i'll admit having to "bake" something inside a sample sounds like limitations but i'll elab on this below

i think the concept of limitations is what makes chiptune...well, chiptune now i think about it
and i guess to better word it i can only currently think of these things:

1) synthesis choices
how are we synthesising our sounds?
opn2 (like sgen), opm (like ym2151) and opz (ym2414) is fm, snes and mod and mariopaint is samples, nes and sms is uhh...psgs? probably?
its not like im boutta see someone pull synthesis with pulse waves...(looking at you, ssg-eg....though then again there are pitch limits prob so- come back here!)

2) size limitations
if there's like a file size limitations (eg, mod,snes aram...without bankswaps) its probably chiptune
im aware s3xmit probably has sample amount limits but we can't be deadass, that thing can hold like 200+ samples at really high quality, i am NOT putting that under the same coat as zx spectrum music we CAN'T be real if we do.

3) is there a specific chip/set of audio chips dedicated to making sound?
sn7 for sms, ym2203 and ym2610 for pc98, vrc6,s5b etc on nes - you get the idea

4)...does it sound chiptuney.
no, seriously. this is what i meant with s3xmodit. sure you have "limitations", but it doesn't sound like chiptune at ALL, and said limitations are SO lenient compared to things like snes, with aram's sample size and echo being in one 64kb file.

now for where i go insane (more)
say a program like....wavetracker. is stuff made in that chiptune?
possibly. you have wavetables like pcengine and virtual boy. you have limitations. blatant ones.
but you can also play samples. high quality ones.
but you also have channel limitations.
and you aren't really playing it on a "dedicated" chip

does fakebit (including botb's format and wildchip) count?
no - unless its stated that it is some form of chiptune like 2a03+s5b for example, if i start hearing high quality samples for an extended period and NO sawtooth or pulse wave in sight, we aren't chipping

there is no "making" a line with this shit
the limitations vary so much




thank you for coming to my ted talk

music made for a soundchip

My personal view on the matter; Chiptune is music that is either styling itself after, or hardware compatible with/made for sound chips.

There needs to be some quality of the music that notably holds some characteristic that pertains to bitcrunch, sound compression or real time synthesis.

Considering things like the Pico8 exist, I don't regard it as inherent to a time period. To me, Video game music stops being Chiptune when the consoles sound systems reached a stage where no obvious limitations were being caused by hardware/software.

Fakebit, I consider within the larger classification of Chiptune. That has to at least utilize a soundchip or vst recreation of a soundchip that has some of the aforementioned qualities.

Music can have Chiptune elements, while not falling directly into the genre, like for instance a good portion of Undertales music. The line there can get pretty grey, and I think that'll always be the case to some degree.

There are deep ties between chiptune and video game music, bit chiptune doesn't have to be VG music.

I rest my case your honour.

If it gives chipist points it's chiptune, if it gives mixist points but the track has chiptune elements it's digital fusion.

@Meleody the not-so-humble wildchip format:

I am from now on going to pretend it doesn't exist.

*crunch crunch crunch crunch*

My personal take on this is that if a song is made in such a way that it can be played on original soundchip hardware, it qualifies as chiptune. There are many things that SOUND like chiptune, but are not, with my favorite example being beepbox and all of its mods. You can make things that SOUND like a certain chip, but those things won't run on those chips. This also applies to doing dual-chip songs. Say you use 2x YM2612 + 2x SN7 on a song. Since this is outside of the scope of the unmodded Genesis/MegaDrive sound capability, it does not qualify as chiptune. I'm probably leaving out a bunch of shit in this but thats my general idea of what qualifies.

Next time I see a "how to make chiptune" tutorial and I see a .SF2 file I'm going to riot. I'm particularly triggered by soundfonts because SNES chiptune is the primary victim of their prevalence.

(edit) Thanks Toby Fox

agreed! i use soundfonts a lot and i say that my music isnt chiptune. i firmly believe in the real generated bleeps and bloops of filesize-tinyness

Chiptune to me is:

• Music made specifically for older hardware - NSF files, SPC files, SID files, etc.
• Music made to mimic sounds of older hardware, or under a very small file limitation (Tinymods, Chiptune .mods which is what "chiptune" originally WAS, Bulby's older chiptune works, modern multi-chip .vgms etc.
• Music made with sounds from older hardware but mixed with modern production standards - stuff that uses Chipsynth plugins, Super Audio Cart, etc.

I think it's pretty silly to limit "chiptune" to just one of these categories. It's a very broad thing. It's a style of writing music, rather than a single genre. You can have chiptune jazz, chiptune brostep, chiptune metal, as we've seen with submissions to this very site.

For me, the appeal of it is that you get something pleasant under tight limitations - whether they're sound limitations or memory limitations, or both! Fakebit stuff pays respect, but doesn't follow these limits, and that's valid too.

(For the .sf2 discussion - it can count IMO. If the intent is to make something that sounds like music from one particular game or something, and it roughly follows the limits, then I don't see why not. Stuff like Musescore's basic soundfont or SGM2 I wouldn't count)

I'd agree with arceus' definition, that chiptune is any music designed for specific musical hardware. However, I would disagree with LastDragon that things such as beepbox or dual-chip stuff discounts it as chiptune and with mirageofher that soundfonts are automatic grounds for disqualifiation. Take the SNES example: I feel that if you compose a song in FL using SNES soundfonts AND you write with the limitations of the hardware in mind, you're writing chiptune, even if you never export it to a file a SNES could play. Same with beepbox; you can cross into wildchip territory, but it's also 100% possible to stay within the bounds of what, say, an NES could do. If you do, that's chiptune to me.

Here's where I honestly think botb has the right idea with Wildchip and Fakebit as terminology; Chip adjacent, but not proper chiptune. I'd personally argue that Fakebit is (for example) ignoring polyphony limits and not thinking with any specific hardware in mind (even as a vague reference, kind of the musical equivalent of "so retro") while Wildchip is chip + other elements (whether "real" instruments OR excessive tracks, or dual chip stuff!).

Like I'd say this entry of mine is more wildchip, but this entry is more fakebit, and neither of them are true chiptune. The only effect I used on the former was a flanger on, like, one instrument, while the latter leans much more heavily on reverb, bitcrush, and other effects to sell the chip-ness. The former also uses only soundfonts, simple waveforms, and bitcrushed sine waves, while the latter uses simple waveforms and bitcrushed drums from a modern drum plugin.

All-in-all, I do think a largely aesthetic approach to defining chiptune would be better than a strictly technical approach, since the aesthetic approach leaves room for interpretation and the messiness of classifying music, where the technical approach may leave stupid edge cases that you'll chase for an eternity to crimp shut; Spirit of the law vs. letter of the law, that kind of thing.

Jesus fuck I just realized how long this is sorry for the essay lmfao