Chip music
I often listen to older game soundtracks. Usually, these are mp3 files, often modernized/arranged versions accessible via streaming services, but it’s fun to listen to the original chip tunes that are part of the game. The thought that the music you listen to comes from tiny data blocks of just a few kilobytes, and effects or instructions are applied in real-time, makes me happy.
Early home computers and consoles generated digital sounds in real time. Initially, the CPU handled this by writing to audio registers or mixing samples in software, consuming significant processing power at the time. To reduce this overhead, manufacturers added dedicated sound chips that generated square waves, noise, FM synthesis, or played back samples independently. This freed up CPU cycles and enabled more complex game audio, but arguably more importantly, it made things sound more like actual music. The different chips gave each machine its distinctive sound or character.
Access and playback
Some games have a built-in “musictest” feature that lets you play individual tracks. However, listening to them while doing something else is somewhat impractical. So, ideally you play them back on your computer.
An “original soundtrack” from this era consists of the instructions and data needed to recreate the music on specific hardware, ripped from the game data and saved to files. These normally aren’t official works - instead, they require hobbyists to manually extract data and label everything. Naturally, law-abiding enthusiasts only extract data from cartridges they legitimately own.
There are multiple archive sites that collect and maintain these music files, most notably Zophar’s Domain, which has an excellent collection that you can listen to directly or download in their original formats. I occasionally also use VGMRips for downloads.
If you know the format/system/chip aready, you can also use any search engine. For example soundtrack parodius spc.
- .vgm / .vgz (Megadrive/Genesis, Arcade)
- .spc (SNES)
- .sid (C64)
- .mod (Amiga)
- .xm, .s3m, .it (PC)
For playback on Windows and macOS, I use Foobar2000. With the two components/plugins Game Music Emu Decoder and OpenMPT Module Decoder, various gaming and chiptune formats can be played back directly, even when still packaged in a .zip file.
I’m quite pleased with the quality, but I’m aware that there are issues in emulation. I have two original SID chips of different revisions in my Ultimate 64 Elite, which I fire up occasionally, but GME does a great job in my opinion.
For playing back 4-channel .mod files, I recommend reducing the stereo separation in the OpenMPT option screen. This helps because most Amiga music wasn’t composed with stereo in mind. (One fire button and speaker is enough…)
What I listen to
Soundtracks of many games tend to have lots of short tracks with widely varying themes (intro, credits, levels, boss fights). This makes it hard to listen to all songs of a game like you’d listen to an album (that 6-second game over melody somewhere in the middle just ruins the mood). That’s why my own collection is organized into playlists, e.g., different lists for tracks that are suitable for coding, chilling, etc.
There are a few exceptions to this, where I listen to the entire soundtrack top to bottom:
The Japanese version of Castlevania 3 for the NES is excellent. Unlike the international versions, Nintendo/Konami put a separate sound chip in the cartridge for the Japanese release, which makes a huge difference. There is a Game Sack episode (starting at 24:50) on this topic if you’re curious about the difference.
Parodius is also outstanding, featuring great remixes of several Gradius songs.
The teaser image is a remix I made of the title screen from “Magical Chase GB” for the Game Boy Color.