Where do I start, let's see...
1. Welcome to the world of chipmusic!
2. Musical Background (Do you play any real instruments?) / Knowledge (theory, scale & chord progression) / Coding & Tracking Experience are very helpful, but not a necessity to begin tracking chip tunes, there are many tutorials and F.A.Q's on how to get started with "coding" your music, Google will help you out a lot with this medium alone.
3. Why do you want to make chip music, this is something to really put some thought into, are you wanting to make actual chip music (non-genre specific tunes) or just video game sounding electronic music (there actually is a difference IMO, but I'm sure there will be a multitude of responses in regard to this matter alone).
4. With regards to #3, is this something you are going to be putting a lot of effort into and plan on doing for a while (tracking in itself can be some what of a science as you are generally coding all of your "music")?
This will pretty much depict what route you should take on starting out as it will basically set a line in the path you choose to travel down from here out.
5. What are your funds like?
With technology these days, you can pretty much choose whatever route you see fit to assemble your tunes with, the people posting above have listed quite a few methods as to which tracking/coding tunes can be achieved, if you aren't planning on dumping a bit of money into your setup, I would start with either Fami Tracker (Free download, search for it on google) or a single grey DMG-01 with LSDJ (check out the manual as well as some of the lovely tutorials these fine chiptuners have made for the public, youtube & Google again will help you out a lot here), if you are familiar with how channel strips work and require more than 4 channels of sound (for added instruments and polyphony), a second DMG can be added with an additional LSDJ cartridge and a basic game boy sync cable, this will enable you to have more pulse channels (they are useful for many things other than just synth leads and melodies / harmonies, they can be used to create kick drums as well as a multitude of other instrument sounds, again, google will take this more in depth for you).
6. Take your time and learn whatever medium you choose to go with, experiment with different sounds, mess with parameters, use the noise channels and learn how to manipulate it, learning to track is a process in itself (hell I started with impulse tracker and a soundblaster awe64 gold years ago and I still learn new things everyday!), don't get discouraged by the learning curve or by other people (every "scene" has a typical set of trolls, this one is no exception), be tenacious about the learning process, once you get the hang of the basics of tracking, things will get a bit more progressive as well as easier.
7. If you choose to go the game boy route, don't worry about modding your hardware at the start, learn your software first, modding can get pretty time intensive and takes away a lot of the focus of just using and learning the software, once you've learned LSDJ (or nanoloop and whatever you choose to utilize, there are many apps for the game boy alone) and are comfortable with it, then start exploring the world of hard modding.
8. HAVE FUN!!! 
Last edited by nkogliaz (Apr 15, 2011 9:06 am)