wow, good reads!

This forum is awesome. That was my first post and the responses were immediate. Thank you everybody.

For anyone else interested, this link was posted on that NesDev forum: http://theshizz.org/forum/index.php?/to … -was-made/

+1 for internet communities.

ah, that explains it then.  the gamecube devices are a bit big, just remembered them saying dolphin on them.

thanks for the new info!

LSDJ_v0.0.1alpha.gb

They could've made it on a sythesizer.

Dolphin was the code name of the GameCube project before it had a real name, as Wii was Revolution, Sega Dreamcast was Duval, etc.

All that is quite correct, though. I remember a photo showing midi gear used to create the SMB 3 music, it was ported in with a development tool. I expect the classic Pokemon soundtracks to have been done like that, considering the GB platform was already ten years old by then

Oh man, that game had some great music. So much more impressive knowing that.

there are development packages/hardware (official and officially-licensed) released for a lot of these consoles (if not all the relevant ones, if you follow rumors on some).  depending on the console and how music on that platform actually works, the end-user of the devkit would have different options.

these devkits often have a GUI element, i suppose that would be their 'chipmusic software' in a way...  or whatever the mechanical means of 'composing' or adding music you have... 

'intelligent devices', for example, was a company which made a lot of the development hardware for nintendo consoles, and was licensed by Nintendo to do so.  i *think* Dolphin might have been the name of the company that did a popular gamecube one, but maybe thats the devices model name...  i dunno, been a while i thought about that stuff.

I recall that Jim Cuomo (Defender Of The Crown OST among many, many others) used straight code for a lot of his soundtracks.

I don't believe game developers used "chip music software" even after it was available... DutyCycleGenerator is an excellent read, regardless!

EDIT:  Meaning trackers or anything we would recognize today.

no, its like this

I know Tommy Tallarico got an NES cart and stuffs...

I remember reading about the software koji kondo (spelling?) used to transport his songs into modules, but sadly I cant remember where

For Pokémon I'd guess some sort of in-house MML flavour. Writing a music compiler isn't rocket science!

I know Chris Hülsbeck wrote his own sort of tracker before the word 'tracker' even existed in that context. He used it to make music back in the days. Ofcourse mostly still programming sounds but as a tracker predecessor he did a pretty good job.