Software with Modules

Arkos Tracker 2 writes music for the AY and YM sound chips of the Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, MSX and Atari ST, and for a handful of other machines. It comes with the player routines needed to get the music into a real program on those platforms, which is the part that usually stops people.

BambooTracker writes music for the Yamaha YM2608, the FM chip in NEC's PC-8801 and PC-9801 machines, and its relatives. It has a full FM instrument editor alongside the tracker, and exports to the formats those machines and their emulators play.

OpenMPT edits and plays MOD, XM, S3M, IT and its own MPTM format, with VST plugin support and a large community.

Renoise is a tracker that grew into a full production environment: the pattern editor is the classic vertical one, but underneath it are VST hosting, automation, a sampler with its own modulation, and rendering to audio. It suits chiptune work that has to sit in a finished mix.

Schism Tracker is a faithful rewrite of Impulse Tracker that runs on modern machines and keeps the original keyboard layout, so muscle memory from the DOS original still works. It is sample-based, reads and writes the old module formats, and is a common way to write chiptune that is not tied to one chip.