Sega Genesis Chiptune Synthesizer

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Jarek Lupinski created this board that uses the actual Sega Genesis sound chips to play chiptune files:

Sega Genesis Native Hardware Chiptune Synthesizer

The VGM file format stores instructions for sound chips, and VGM files for many popular games can be found online. An Atmega1284p microcontroller will read these VGM files from an SD card and translate them into signals to send to the onboard YM2612 and SN76489 chips. These chips were used by the original Sega Genesis hardware to make the sound effects and music in Genesis games.

Source: https://hackaday.io/project/13361-sega-genesis-native-hardware-chiptune-synthesizer
Source: https://hackaday.io/project/13361-sega-genesis-native-hardware-chiptune-synthesizer
Sega Genesis Chiptune Synthesizer

3 thoughts on “Sega Genesis Chiptune Synthesizer”

  1. Nice project! I wanted to do something similar some years ago, but couldn’t find the time to work on it.

    I have one question, how do you handle sample playback? IIRC the 1284 has 16 KiB RAM, and I don’t think samples of some songs might fit there along with the memory footprint required by the program. Do you maybe write the samples to flash memory before starting playback?

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