I agree that you don't need something like Renoise to do chiptunes the purist way. I would even go as far as to say that using Renoise makes your chiptunes less "chituneish". On the other hand, it really depends on the individual approach, some of you will certainly disagree, but to me, making chiptunes does not exclude the use of advanced DSP and it does not even exclude vst... so I think you can use Renoise to make chipmusic...
In the end it all boils down to how you define chiptunes, but personally I don't care a lot about definitions, as Duke Ellington once said, there's two types of music: the good one and the rest.
Offline
Italy
Offline
Kiel, Germany
For me, Renoise is to lsdj what hookers are to blow: You can do well with just one of the two, but both at the same time yield the best results.
For "just chiptune", I prefer a gameboy and nothing more, but using renoise adds such a huge dimension of possibilities...
Though I haven't bought it yet. ... ... ...SHUT UP I DON'T HAVE THE MONEY! HOOKERS AND BLOW ARE EXPENSIVE!!!
Offline
Renoise is worth it if you intend to make something other than chip with it as well.
It's extremely powerful, very similar to MilkyTracker [both take their UI-design from FastTracker II, so there shouldn't be too many problems], and works rather well, even on crap machines.
I had Renoise 1.9 on a 500MHz iBook, 192MB of RAM. I made a fairly complicated track, and used only about 30% CPU [uses ~3% CPU on my current 2.1GHz PC].
Also, the sampler in Renoise. Maaaan, the sampler. BEST. THING. EVER. Applying DSPs straight to samples, precise loop editor, and being generally easy to use... great stuff.