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Some of Chipsounds' controls are specific to the chip you have selected.

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• Review

There are two reasons why the sounds of outdated computers and games consoles refuse to fade into obscurity: not only do they instil great nostalgia for the days of our misspent youth, but they have a uniquely edgy and sometimes unpredictable character that smooth-running soft synths and cutting-edge beatboxes have a hard time competing with.

To get your fix of such sounds from the source would mean locating a working example of a 20-30 year-old piece of hardware and obtaining (and learning to use) some music software, or programming your own. And as for integrating the bleepin' thing with an existing setup, that's another world of pain. But with a modern Mac or PC and Plogue's Chipsounds, you can have essentially the same results after suffering a mere 30-second installation routine.

Overview

Chipsounds is a soft synth that offers a faithful recreation of nine classic chip configurations found in home computers and consoles of the '70s/'80s. The documentation carefully avoids mentioning actual brands, but you can expect to find emulations of the chips from old favourites like the Nintendo Entertainment System, Atari ST, ZX Spectrum 128, Nintendo Game Boy, Commodore 64 and VIC-20, Atari 400/800 and 2600.

There are some less well-known efforts, too, such as the SN76489 found in the ColecoVision console and BBC Micro; the P8244/ P8245 of the Magnavox Odyssey²; and the UVI 2637 that lurked inside the Arcadia 2001. And there's one final chip that comes from neither console nor computer but from Casio's VL-1 mini keyboard.

An enormous - some would say obsessive - amount of effort has clearly gone into deciphering how these chips create their signature sounds. We're used to seeing this kind of attention to detail in emulations of classic synths and studio gear, but here the same ethos has been applied to mass-produced home entertainment devices.

The five-page user interface, while not ideal, is at least straightforward. The Controls page is the most important, offering an arpeggiator and wave sequencer preset-saving for both sections.

The arpeggiator offers ten playback patterns with host sync. As well as looping, it can play in one-shot mode, with or without sustain of the last note. Also cool is Proportional Division, which ensures that each arp cycle lasts the same amount of time, whether you play two notes or ten.

However, it's the wave sequencer that's vital for those crazy, rapid note flutters and crescendos that chip musicians wield so well. As the manual rightly states, it looks much like the 'instrument' or 'sample' pages found in trackers on 8-bit machines – basically, a mini-tracker that's triggered on each note. Rows are played from top to bottom, with the duration of each specified in the T column, and a row can play a note, switch waveforms, adjust the pitch or modulate any parameter.