The IDM chipmusic-on-chip album ‘Today’ was released as a physical 16-bit cartridge for the Sega Megadrive/Genesis video game console. The sound is generated at playtime by the Yamaha YM2612 FM synthesizer chip that is built into the console.
The concept is to do away with the conventional audio recording which is the standard format for practically all music now released.
Breathing new life into this obsolete Sega console in 2010, ‘Today’ aims to reinvigorate interest in old hardware and the idea of listening to music where the sound is generated each time you listen.
This music has now been captured from the real hardware and made available for purchase.
credits
released 02 December 2010
Music, Artwork, PCB Design & Assembly: freezedream (Nathan Stanley)Coding/Testing: Alex Cichowski – Thankyou so much for your long hours working out bugs and optimizing things. :)
Player Code: Shiru & Alone Coder
Sounds beautiful! Love it!
Great news! I actually contacted Freezedream recently requesting this.
Great album. Bought this just now. Would have been awesome to own original cart version but what can you do >_>
Really happy this got a digital release so I can listen to it whenever.
any chance of being able to procure this as a ROM? I’d love to throw this on my PSP or maybe run it on a genesis flash cart some day.
For some reason I really want people to stop doing this. Please. But on a positive note the music is great.
oh yea making ROM albums is SOOO LAME…. Wait whut?
Heh, was waiting for that, probably not a popular opinion. I don’t think its lame at all actually though.
The best way I can say it is this. I look at writing chip music as a way to liberate the amazing, beautiful, lofi sounds of the chips from their console/computer game prison. I think the sound chips, despite mostly being just crude add-ons to consoles/computers for a cheap way to add sound, are like a happy accidents of corner-cutting manufacturing, capable of sounds that to my ears are unique and wonderful. So thats why its worth all the effort hacking/restoring/fighting with these crusty, under powered, un-user freindly, often frustrating machines to coax the sounds out.
I look at releasing music on a cart as deliberatly putting the sounds back in to limited physical medium that took multiple tools and lot of effort to circumvent in the first place. That being said, I would consider buying it just to support good chip music, as long I got the mp3 copy’s too.
-Matt
Thanks for elaborating.. I can totally agree with that, but when the album is a nice blend of the a/v I think that can be really cool..
If the only reason people created chipmusic was for the sound, then why not just use emulation or even modern soft-synths? No, I think a large part of the attraction is the hardware itself. Let’s not make little of those beautiful sound chips, either. ;)
A ROM would be cool. I guess we just gotta give em time to make some green.