Might as well join in!
I've always been fascinated with electronics and retro gear, having grown up with the NES and MS-DOS in 1997... Guess chiptunes was a natural addition. I got into chiptunes when I spent my savings on a PocketPC instead of an MP3-player some time 2004. Its ROM was a grand total of 32MB, so fitting MP3s on there...? Tough luck! Instead I bumped into milkyplay and modarchive one day, and that's it. In particular, I remember being amazed at how good the tunes could sound, all the while taking up so little space. I recall tearing the tunes apart in some tracker at first, eventually giving up and just enjoying the music instead.
5 years later, me and a friend started at an out-of-town university, having to take the train back and forth every day. I started fiddling with milkytracker, managing to coerce the metalhead into giving it a shot as well. Started with horrendous 40-minute-compos, we moved on to famitracker once we finally got Wine working, and we eventually survived bachelor thesis by making our FCM8 entries for relaxation.
...my god, this ended up being my life story rather than my motivation in chipping. Uhh, I guess the appeal was partly the challenge of getting the four fairly primitive channels into sound decent. Also, being able to make the vidya gaems system from my childhood to emit my own tunes was pretty damn thrilling. Most of all tho, it was the limited options in instrumentation... Meaning more time to worry about the music, rather than filtering and mastering and samples and who-knows-what. FamiTracker also had a kickass interface.
All that said, I now live 5 minutes away from work, and I have no excuse to track anymore... Aside from the occasional joke-OHC, I suppose I'm done for the most part. It was fun!
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