MusicRadar

• Review

But this is where the GUI really grinds, as not only is the visible range of the table tiny, but it's entirely mouse-driven - click the MIDI CC column, for instance, and a huge dropdown menu appears, ranging from 0 to 127. Tracker-style keyboard control would be preferable, or at least the option to increment/decrement with left/right keys.

Each chip has custom controls and a selection of timbres (eg, waveforms, noise types and chip 'tricks'), selected using keyswitches or a menu. Many chips come in several varieties, eg, PAL and NTSC types, offering European and US chip clock timings respectively, and thus slightly different tunings.

The sound engine uses a careful combination of synthesis and samples - around 95% is the former, says Plogue. As for control, many generic parameters (eg, in the Modulation page) are exposed via MIDI CC and, where appropriate, chip-specific parameters such as SID PWM are bound to CCs, too.

Sound

Which are the tastiest chips? Top of most people's wanted list is surely the SID chip of Commodore 64 fame. We found its reproduction to be remarkably accurate, buzzing away nicely from the saw waveform or tightly vibrating our speakers with its triangle output.

The waveform list includes mixed combinations alongside versions that include ring modulation. There's no dynamic ring modulation or oscillator sync, but these are promised as the SID emulation moves closer to synthesis (it's currently the most sample-based of the emulations). Controls available are filter type, cutoff and resonance, as well as PWM with LFO modulation.

Our second favourite has to be the DMG-CPU, as used by Nintendo's Game Boy. This chip creates a smoother sound using either a pulse waveform with adjustable width, or a custom waveform you can draw in yourself. If you're after a more industrial sound, then the crude, crunching tones of the POKEY integrated circuit, as used by early Atari machines, will find a place in your heart. Plenty of raw harmonics can be found in the earlier waveforms, while the wayward tuning of the '1x1' register configuration is present and correct.

"Top of most people's wanted list is surely the SID chip of Commodore 64 fame. We found its reproduction to be remarkably accurate."

Also neat are the crunchy, characterful drum kits, which use samples replayed via the emulated chips - eg, using C64 'digi' routines.

As well as the aforementioned SID, the other chip that we found to be 'not all there' is the AY-3-8910/YM2149F emulation. Unlike the real thing, you can't blend the noise channel with the pulse wave, which rules out certain possibilities of the original chip (eg, snare drum noises). There are 'envelope waves' and an Atari ST-style 'sync buzzer' sound, but the grungy basses and squawking acid tones produced by using the envelope and pulse wave together are absent.

Plogue says that such tricks should be possible in a future version of Chipsounds, once it's sussed out a way of making them accessible. This is understandable - if Chipsounds offered the kind of low-level control that's available by programming the chips directly, it would likely make the instrument impractical, especially considering its multichip nature.

Summary

Chip pedantry aside, the real issue is sound, and we found each emulation to be very true to its original. Drifting through the far-too-few presets conjures up all kinds of memories, but more importantly, these sounds are usable and immediate. Start playing a keyboard, and you'll discover a tactile dimension to these sounds that's not readily realised with a hex editor running on a 320x200-resolution screen.

Listen to what Chipsounds can do: