Furnace – the biggest multi-system chiptune tracker ever made

Definitions:<p>Chiptune, also called 8-bit music, is a style of electronic music made using the programmable sound generator (PSG) sound chips or synthesizers in vintage arcade machines, computers and video game consoles. The term is commonly used to refer to tracker format music using extremely basic and small samples that an old computer or console could produce.[1]<p>A music tracker (sometimes referred to as a tracker for short) is a type of music sequencer software for creating music.[2]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chiptune" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chiptune</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Music_tracker" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Music_tracker</a>

I tried Furnace Tracker earlier this year. I always wanted to learn more about using trackers to create chiptunes. I followed a tutorial from Button Masher:<p>How to Learn Chiptune Trackers <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Q37XuOLz0jw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Q37XuOLz0jw</a><p>The tutorial uses Furnace. It provides a great overview of the components, and then guides you through a hands-on exercise of transcribing an existing demo. This was a nice way to get more familiar with Furnace. Button Masher provides some demos to use, but also there are many demos at the furnace github project:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tildearrow&#x2F;furnace&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;demos">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tildearrow&#x2F;furnace&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;demos</a>

I wanted to try composing some music in this way and this style, but I found it hard to get started, being paralysed by choice. It’s big, it’s multi-system… but I just want to start with something decent. I’m not targeting any particular device, just making music. Sometimes simple, sometimes with more harmonisation, effects like wobble and pitch bend and such, but I’m not interested in things like sampling; mostly I just want something a bit more powerful than BeepBox. I know I’m being vague, but does anyone happen to have any suggestions and recommendations for which systems might work well?<p>For a different project, I’d also like this sort of thing but with a Web Audio API-based player, potentially real-time scriptable rather than static. So ideally the perfect system would also be easy to use on the web.

This is pretty crazy - even the ZX Spectrum beeper is supported. Is there some Z80 player code allowing the music to be played on real hardware?

Speaking of tracker music, I can&#x27;t not mention &quot;Professional Trackers&quot; by Hoffman &amp; Daytripper. Not only because the music is cool but because of what they did visually.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=E9ErmKpTcFA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=E9ErmKpTcFA</a><p>Even better, if you have a tracker that lets you see a whole patch at once (worked fine with milkytracker) download the MOD and play it directly in the tracker<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;modarchive.org&#x2F;index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&amp;query=174955" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;modarchive.org&#x2F;index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&amp;qu...</a>

this is really epic. Little sad to see the instruments aren&#x27;t vsti, but i guess that&#x27;s totally understadable for such a project :D. work daily with Renoise tracker and was hoping to grab some haha!. Love trackers! &lt;3 its the best way to make digital music!<p>Very epic project and a crazy achievement to make such a complete and huge tracker for chiptunes!

This thing is truly a technical marvel and a massive accomplishment by the developer. He works tirelessly and at one point closed out every one of the hundreds of issues filed on the repo before it&#x27;s 0.6 release. The number of supported chips and interacting features is unparalleled by anything else.

This is what I wanted:<p>&gt; <i>mix and match sound chips! &#x2F;&#x2F; over 200 ready to use presets from computers, game consoles and arcade boards... &#x2F;&#x2F; ...or create your own presets - up to 32 chips or a total of 128 channels</i><p>Do you want a SID chip based system with as many channels as you want? There you are...

Is it possible to use this to make songs for multiple chips at once?<p>In the pokeymax and sidmax projects I have dual pokey, dual sid, dual ym2149 and a simple dma sample engine available. It would be great to make some songs using all of them for their strengths at the same time.

Are there any sample tracks extant that utilize the broad range of chips that Furnace has ?

Looks awesome! But does it play s3m files? :-)

I&#x27;ll give the benefit of doubt in accuracy for chip emulations not executed in their real world clock rate, which would be quite expansive to do real-time. But as a creative environment, this is pure fun!

These guys do this with real vintage hardware:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;theotherdays.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;theotherdays.net&#x2F;</a>

Lots of comments herein cover things I would otherwise post, so I&#x27;ll just say this is great fun. Love that it&#x27;s FOSS. Now, everyone go make some music!

This is a delight. I loved the intro, had a blast from the past with the keygen exes back when.<p>Looks very sofisticated, gonna give it a go!

Here I was, from the title alone, under the impression that this was something created to be able to track different cars&#x2F;engines based on their individual chip tuning (performance enchantments etc.). Boy was I wrong.