I made a modern style DAW to make music for the Sega Genesis/MD (Feedback is appreciated)
Hey everyone! I've been working on a DAW specifically for composing music for the Mega Drive / Genesis, and it's finally reached a stable state and runs on basically toasters as well.
MD Synth DAW is free, open source (MIT), and available for Windows x64, Linux and macOS (x64+ARM64).
Update 2026-10-04:
As of now the MacOS builds are broken, this happens as that's the only operating system I couldn't test, I'll be working on a solution.
- Fully built YM2612 and SN76489 chips from scratch in software.
- Piano roll / Pattern based like FL Studio.
- Hardware constraint handling, you can't make the song do something the console can't.
- Export to VGM, VGZ, XGM, WAV, FLAC, OGG, OPUS & WEBM
- Import VGM, VGZ, XGM, MIDI, TFI (preset file).
- App comes with it's own file types as well:
- MDSYN - the project file
- MDBANK - file containing multiple presets in the form as a "bank". Runs and imports automatically on execution
- MDPRESET - a singular preset file. Double click importable. Runs and imports automatically on execution
The website has screenshots and usage guides.
I'd love feedback from anyone who uses Furnace, DefleMask, trackers, or other DAWs. Is there anything you feel is missing or could be improved?
Website: https://meguminbot.github.io/md-synth-daw/
GitHub: https://github.com/MeguminBOT/md-synth-daw
Music made with it: https://youtu.be/yKJc5uL4_-4?si=gW3F-08LbgJ0qKSn
>AI was used to gather the material I needed for researching prior to the project, no AI generated code with the exception of the apps dev test suite and the website itself.