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
Tag: Alone Coder
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Today – freezedream now available digitally
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“Today” Sega Megadrive/Genesis EP on a Cartridge
As you can tell, there are still a fair few bugs to be sorted out, but it gives you some idea. Currently, we have playback issues (again) on the actual hardware and so this is a video capture from Fusion emulator. hmm
Credits (yeah I kind of skipped over them a bit in the video):
music & art: Nathan Stanley (me)
code: Alex Cichowski
player code: Shiru & Alone Coder