r/chiptunes

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.

here i showcase my very early version of the movement system for my link's awakening inspired top-down platformer, i'm rather happy on how the movement is shaping, tho i'm having trouble on how to handle collision, only able to use GET_TILE_ID on GBVM, and manually blacklis or whitelist walls or ground tiles, it causes a big amount of framerate issues

if anybody seems interested in helping me with that you can comment or message me in dms

So, this is kind of a crazy idea I had. Pretty much a 6 channel chip with fractional pulse waves, Tri/Saw Envelopes, Wavetable, LSFR Noise and PCM. Plus Pulse/Envelope/Noise mixing, stereo and mirroring functions. This is a crappy ass schematic, but hopefully you can understand what is intended (forgot to add mirroring to it).

I'm not actually working on it, it's just another useless idea of mine. I only have a rudimentary high school level with learning ICs and digital electronic stuff. If anyone that knows more about the technical side of sound chips, I'd appreciate some input, though. Just to know if it could idealy function as a real chip.

You can tell it's an amalgamation of a few chips, though I couldn't find anything on Furnace that does all this. Which is why I'm made the "schematic". I was also considering FM in this too, but I'm not sure how that would work. Frankly, idk what I'm doing, I just have ambitious thoughts, I guess.