Glorious 8-bit Chiptunes (Page 2 of 2)

i laughed audibly.

and just to be clear, the diving helmet is me. I asked the penguin what kind of music he likes, and this is what he said. he has plenty of musical gear in his house.

also in the same visit, he sold me an amp for cheap. that's a very chiptune thing to do.

the next day he said he wants to start wearing leopard print clothes.

we made it guys. we're famous now.

Last edited by Decktonic (Jun 23, 2013 9:33 pm)

That's pretty cool! But what about the sound device: what makes a particular device 4-bit? The Game Boy for example, has a bunch of 4-bit DACs, but panning, mixing and master volume multiplication of the channels seem to happen after d/a conversion, which I'd say this complicates classification a bit.

What devices qualify as being "8-bit"?

And what about the SID (More importantly, what about the Sony Dreamcast 4-bit)? My point here is that "8-bit" is more or less used as a catch-all for any blip-bloppy music, and in that context hardly refers to any tangible technical aspect of production.

I'm just trying to raise the question, since this has been bugging me for a while. Not to rag on you, to be clear! It's just kind of annoying to me when people call Game Boy (or YM2149/AY equivalent) music "4-bit" (especially when they do it to correct someone calling it "8-bit") when there's really no technical basis to what distinguishes it from so called 8-bit music. Very few sound chips (can't think of any, really) typically used for 8-bit music would qualify as being "8-bit" in the terms that people use to say that Game Boy music is "4-bit".

And yes, there evidently are 4-bit computers which deliberately produce musical sound (probably also decimal computers and analog computers as well), but I think that they have little relevance in this context. BTW, going to have to order one of those Gakken computers!