Apologies for bumping the topic, but I thought I'd put my own experiences here. First I'll give my sollutions to the original poster, then I'll ask a question of my own relating to chiptunes.
First off, there are two ways I use to create 8 bit chiptunes, one of which I haven't done much with publicly. The first is using a program called ppmck. It is a Japanese program but has an English patch. It is basically a chain of command line programs that convert an mml file, which is just notes and simple script to make instruments, into an nsf file, which you can play on an NsF compatible player. There are several Winamp plug-ins which can play NSF files, and other stand alone players too. All of them are free.
The second method I use to create chiptune music is through midi. I was not satisfied with the nes fonts I had been playing with, so I made my own sound font with a program called sf2comp. You don't need SF2comp to use the font though. I still have it hosted, though it is pretty old now and the documentation is poorly written. Here is a link.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/540 … ndfont.zip
The sound font has most of the Nes's basic waveforms and a few well known drum and bass samples from various Nes games. I set up the sound font so that all you get is raw waveforms, which you will have to mess with yourself to make nice chip noises because I was tired of seeing a few presets which really weren't very versatile. You could make using the sound font easier by using MML again to automate things. I haven't played much with using MML data through midi, but I know it is possible, at least to some extent. You could use a MML to midi converter to control a sound font, which depending on your preference, may be more efficient than doing MML through PPMCK.
And now, my question to you all. I love 8 bit synths, and am still looking for new ways to create chiptunes, I do know a c64 MML based language is being worked on, which I am very excited for. Unfortunately we've been waiting a while for its release, and the stuff out there at present is either not very promising or is not accessible. But, let's say I want to make music from slightly more in the future, such as .mod, or .xm files. Those types of files have the musical data like an 8 bit tune would, but they also have samples to go along with it. So, you could have a sample of a trumpet playing one note, set loop points for the sample, and set up multiple channels so you could make a really cheesy brass piece from those one or two samples. The Snes has such a sound system that relied on samples, but from what I can gather, it was not easy to code for and really was a mess, thanks to Supernintendo and its implementation of drivers. It really does show in some Snes games too, and you can tell which games had better tools to work with the hardware and which ones struggled. The only thing I can find to make sample based chips is a tracker called Open MPT, which is only partially accessible. A friend of mine asked for some work to be done, but I don't think anything was actually started, though the developer(s) did seem open to the idea. There are millions of other trackers out there but I've really backed away from trackers, since I don't know how they work and I don't have one I'd call accessible to figure out. But if there was such a tracker and a decent tutorial to go with it, I would give it a go. If there was such a thing as an mml converter that would allow the creation of such sample based chiptunes, I'd be happy to mess with it, though I doubt such a thing exists because my search for one turns up nothing even remotely promising. Does anyone know more than I do about this?
Make more of less, that way you won't make less of more!
If you like what you're reading, please give a thumbs-up.
