Hi there! I'm DayDreamer, and ever since I was a little kid I was an 8bit game enthusiast, whether I was playing at an arcade, playing Sonic Mega Collection on my gamecube, or playing Namco Museum on my playstation. I always loved the music in these old games, and ever since discovering and diving into the world of chiptune, I have been enthralled and fascinated. I think my chiptune obsession started its peak when Plogue Chipspeech came out. I love virtual singers, and seeing relics of voice synthesis history resurrected into a VST immediately caught my interest. I love Plogue's products (although they make this teenage girl's wallet cry) and have just had so much fun learning about chips, emulation, and the history of chiptune.
I'm currently using a DAW to make my music, but I plan on eventually moving to a more traditional means of making chiptune since I feel like those platforms may offer some more control. I look forward to getting to know you all and expanding my knowledge on this music genre and it's sounds' origins. I love meeting new people, so feel free to message me!
Greetings Daydreamer,
My recommendation would be to start with Deflemask and Famitracker to get started making authentic chiptunes for a variety of old game systems. You can even export your songs to a format that will play right off the real console hardware or cartridges.
Sunvox is also great. Though, if you feel up to more robust software, Renoise is a good tracker that allows you to use VSTs very easily.
Oh, by the way, Deflemask and Famitracker are 100% free. No purchase necessary.
Hello to you DayDreamer 
Always nice to see a new face (so to speak.)
marcb0t probably has the best suggestion ever. You didn't specify if there was a specific console or system you want to produce music with, and unlike DAWs, trackers offer such specific and fine control over actual composition. As such, Deflemask will allow you to create music with the sounds of a small handful of different systems if you aren't totally sure exactly which you intend to work with. Different systems, very different sounds abilities of course so it definitely makes a good place to start.
I hope you stick with it. Between an individual's love for the stuff they grew up with, and the sheer audacity of using hardware for things it was really not designed for (like being a sort of music studio), chiptune is genuinely awesome.
If you run into the occasional chip snob or prick that feels the need to tell you what you are doing "wrong" with your music, don't fall into the trap of actually listening to their bs. You'd be somewhat hard pressed to find any two chiptuners who sound exactly alike
welcome to the forum daydreamer, hope you dig it here. theres a ton of information about all different kinds of software, just peel through the subforums, see what people have to say and post. you'll find all kinds of useful tools and samples to write with here.
i recommend checking out schism tracker. some bugfixes just got made to it not long ago and it works really well now. its a clone of impulse tracker, which wont run on any non-dos platforms too easily. i started using it in 1996 or 97 and i still keep a windows 98 machine around for it. of course im assuming youre running a windows machine, but i think theres even mac builds of it too. with schismtracker, it you can bring any kind of samples into it you want of all different types, it supports a lot of file formats. if you start out with it, you might have a lot more ease switching to some of the other stuff like famitracker or even something a little more graphical based in the future too...schism tracker is almost 100% devoted to keyboard input and no mouse, so you can really easily have a good workflow with that where you can get a lot of ideas out and take it to any other program once you feel comfortable with writing and more or less know what to do with a tracker.
i think anything you can do in the other programs you can do in schism a little better more or less too, depends on what you're going for in what you write. also depends on whethre youre into making your own samples. if youre cool with that and do a bunch of your effects before you even start writing, this is the program for you. if you like the idea of making your own samples to write with, that could be somethin to think about. i feel like its always fun to make up some weird samples and see what i can do with em abstractly vs really writing a banger song sometimes, so i would say that matters a good bit, what kind of stuff you want to make vs how much time are you comfortable with spending learning what all the stuff does. you also might find it more beneficial to stick with schism or modplug tracker, which is a little more graphically based program but still uses almost all the same commands, or to use something like famitracker to get a more authentic sound. but maybe schism has the most comprehensive bits of what you'd expect out of a program in terms of the effects you can use on the samples. you have a lot of control with that vs other programs. some people say modplug tracker feels a little bit slow, personally i think its because of the mouse. seems like most programs rely on em to some extent, but everyones diffrent of course. try em all! anyways, i dont wanna try and sell you on it too hard, but thats my recommendation. i hope it helps and that with whatever you use that you can get some good jams goin!
Hello there! I am also new here and welcome to the forum.
Are you interested more in the authentic sounds, or using authentic hardware?
I'm also a total noob here as well (kind of 'discovered' it all just before Christmas), and have equally had lots of fun learning about history and usage etc. (which to an older male here feels kind of bizarre that I didn't get into it at the time!).
I'm going down the gameboy and LSDJ tracker route - purely because it's watching a Chipzel set that inspired me, because I like the idea of making full-blown composition with a 26 year old toy, and because I'm enjoying fixing and modding 'retired' gameboys!
Good luck and I hope you find something that really suits you and inspires you! Thanks to others for software suggestions here - I'd never heard of Deflemask!
EDIT: Wow, how does one end up being quoted at the top of the website?! lol
Last edited by Psynaptik (Jan 20, 2017 12:49 pm)