Bitbear's Chiptunes

Chiptunes are songs which mimic the sound of physical hardware chips such as Commodore 64’s SID or ZX Spectrum’s AY-3-8910.

Originally, “chip tunes” had to be produced on hardware with actual synthesizers on a chip – hence the name. On the Amiga and IBM PC, no such standard synthesizer chips were available, so “chip tunes” were rather faithful emulations produced using samples.

Besides the oldschool sound, the other defining characteristic of chip tunes was file size. Somewhere around 10 kilobytes was usually the upper file size limit and had to be adhered to if you wanted to participate in a chip tune competition.

You can find all of Bitbear’s chiptunes below.

1996

1995