Chiptune Software

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.

Bfxr adds new waveforms, filters and a mixer to the sfxr formula, and runs in the browser.

Bosca Ceoil is aimed squarely at people who have never written music. Everything is on one screen, the instruments are chosen from a list, and the scale and chord helpers make it hard to play a wrong note. Blue is the maintained rebuild of the original, and it runs on desktop and in a browser.

ChipTone builds sound effects from layered oscillators, envelopes and effects with a lot more control than an sfxr style generator.

DefleMask targets the Mega Drive, Game Boy, NES, PC Engine, Master System, C64 and more, exporting files that run on real hardware.

FamiTracker writes music for the NES sound chip and its expansions, and exports NSF files that play on real hardware. Community forks (0CC, Dn) continue its development.

Furnace is an open source tracker that emulates a very long list of sound chips, from the NES and Game Boy to arcade FM, with VGM export and DefleMask compatibility.

GoatTracker writes SID music on modern machines and exports player routines that run on a real C64.

LSDj runs on an actual Game Boy (or an emulator) and turns it into a four-channel tracker and live performance instrument.

A classic free chiptune synth plugin with pulse, triangle and noise voices, pitch and volume sequences, and modern DAW compatibility.

MilkyTracker recreates the FastTracker II workflow for XM and MOD files, with sample editing and playback on every platform.

Nanoloop is a music sequencer built around a grid rather than a tracker's note list, which makes it quick to sketch a pattern and hard to write anything conventional. It started as a Game Boy cartridge, where it synthesises sound on the console's own hardware, and also exists as a phone app.

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

Plogue's chipsynth SFC reproduces the SNES's SPC700 sample chip with its filters and effects, inside a regular DAW.

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.

SunVox combines a pattern tracker with a modular synthesizer, and runs the same on desktops, phones and the web.

hUGETracker writes Game Boy music on the desktop and exports it with a small driver that game developers can drop into GBDK and RGBDS projects.

inSIDious is a detailed emulation of the Commodore 64's SID chip as a plugin instrument, covering both the 6581 and the 8580 and the quirks that separate them. Three oscillators, the chip's filter, envelopes and a sequencer for the fast arpeggios the SID is known for, with several hundred presets. It runs in the free Reaktor Player.

rFXGen is a small, portable sound effect generator in the sfxr tradition, with wave export and a web version.

sfxr generates jump, laser, explosion and pickup sounds with one click, then lets you tweak the synth parameters. Every later sound effect generator descends from it.