A Few Words About GIR's Chiptune Collection!

Gonna forego turning this entire post green or bracketing it for you, lets just make it understood now that this post is from GIR:


In the US, we had the Apple 2 series of computer in the early 80's
(which had only a single beep channel by default, so it's
uninteresting insofar as chip tunes. There was a music add on board
for it, but that's a different story...) and that gradually gave way
through the 80's to the IBM-PC (which since it was mostly a business
machine had a primitive single sound channel by default, so also
generally uninteresting for chiptunes) and the Macintosh (which did
better for certain musical things, but wasn't good for chiptunes
either). Ergo, on this side of the Atlantic, we associate chiptunes
with consoles.

In Europe, things were very different. There were a mess of computers
with interesting multichannel sound capabilities that were popular.
While the Commodore 64 and Amiga made a tiny ripple in the American
market, they were huge in Europe, so virtually all the good chiptunes
for those systems is from there. But they also had a ton of other
computers - the ZX Spectrum, the Amstrad CPC, the Atari computer line
(400/800/XL/ST/STE/Falcon), Acorn/BBC Micro, MSX, and so on. Many of
these are well supported in the chiptune scene, and they frequently
have their own dedicated music archives - the High Voltage SID
Archive, the SNDH collection, Project AY, Amiga UnExotica, and others.

In Japan, there were a ton of non-IBM computers with chiptunes as
well, but it's kind of a mess to get good information on them in
english, so we'll leave that for another time.