Re: Want to put your chiptune makeing to the test? lets go!
Well, if you want to make chiptune-like things in a DAW, there are infinite ways to do it. I'm not the expert on that, since i'm most interested in writing for real limitations of sound chips.
Most accessible chiptune creation tools use MML. MML is a simple language for writing notes and other commands which make your song. MML files are simply text files which you can write in Notepad, so pretty easy stuff, at least in principal, though it's harder than it looks to make something good!
I'll briefly cover some mml chiptune tools I know of. I won't cover download links on these since they are often found in really obscure places and I only know about them from friends who find them, but I can provide links if you're interested in any of these. Also I won't cover much on the actual technical side of chiptune production... best place to find info on that is to read up on the sound chip and tools you're working with, and work out how to do things and what you can and cannot easily do.
For nes, the best option is ppmck so far as I know.
For a bunch of other consoles, you have xpmck. It's somewhat limited in its feature set, but it does give you support for a wide variety of 8 bit sound chips and some fm ones. C64 is supported, but pretty limited.
For Snes, you have
AddmusicK. It's designed to make music for Super Mario World romhacks, but it's a capable spc composition tool and easy to use just for that purpose if that's what you want.
There's also a tool called SuperC, which is another mml composition tool for Snes. I mostly prefer addmusicK though.
For a lot of sound chips in the vgm format, you have mml2vgm. It has support for a healthy amount of wavetable, psg, sample and FM options. It's a Japanese program but supports many sound chips and is pretty easy to get working once you get past reading a Google translated manual to learn how things work. Plus it's actively maintained, in fact three! new versions were released today, which is way more than can be said for a lot of other mml programs.
There are other tools such as pmd, hoosic, fmp, mgsc etc. but I haven't really played with those due to them having a stronger Japanese following. A lot of the tools I mentioned above are Japanese too, but some are a little easier to learn about, due to having more western interest. Others are really hard to get to grips with, and a lot of that I'm sure is because of the language barrier.
And if you're into modules, Open MPT is pretty much fully accessible now, and that opens up some interesting possibilities in the chiptune realm. Some modules have very chiptune-like samples, so you can mess with that if you like, but you can also write modules for various other tools. For instance, you can use Snesmod, another SPC composition tool, or Super nsf, a custom NSF driver that turns the dpcm channel of the nes into 4 pcm channels! Both of these tools take .it files as input, possibly with some comments to set up parameters which are foreign to modules, and then spit out a conversion.
I know this probably just overloaded you with some not-so-helpful information, but there's just sooo much to cover, I can't really go over it all in one post. If you like, let me know what interests you and I can help from there.
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