I had a nostalgia trip which began quite lightly and searched for old sweet songs for Amiga games. It started with Lost Patrol, Golden Axe and Super Cars 2. This was admittedly a couple of months ago. But recently, I was curious if there could be any remixed versions.
Then I discovered that there are a plethora of remixed soundtracks and some were real good, really incredibly good actually! Most are electronic trance styles, but there are also smooth piano/symphony and a few rare orchestral versions.

Here I saw a new collection began to take shape and started looking for more games with great soundtracks. There were also discoveries in reverse order from Amiga games I never even heard of or at least didn´t take much notice of where the remixed songs were really good. The game could be really bad, a pain to play and the soundtrack could be really awesome. So now I have therefore put up a small collection of my favorite songs in Musik » Chipmusik category. Here I mainly prioritize remixed versions of game soundtracks for the Amiga, Commodore 64, then miscellaneous demo scenes and possibly a few other platforms such as Sega. Go ahead and enjoy!

For the new listeners, unknowingly, on what chip music or chiptune is and what it means, I have tried to compile a small article if you choose to read on ....

This is how a simple Demoscene from 1987 on a Commodore 64 could look and sound like with a nice soundtrack using the SID soundchip.

What is chiptune or chip music?
You might think that it is a style of music that began in the second half of the 80 's, when revolutionary audio chip came to on low-cost home computers such as the Commodore 64 (SID), Atari ST (YM2149F) and Amiga (Paula), even the Nintendo NES and Gameboy. But it is not a musical style or genre, but it is rather an instrument, a new method, which you can create a variety of unique styles of music or genres, be it synth, underground, dance, pop, rock, etc. It was also not uncommon with covers of popular radimusic at a later date.
Today the term is used mostly to describe music that is more or less inspired by the sounds from these audio chips.

Chiptune has even been played on Swedish radio P3. It began in 2000 as a modest proposal in a small program called "Frankerat" (swedish for "stamped"). After a positive response it was allowed to be aired each month and was named M-P3. A year later, the chiptune program was assigned to be broadcast each week and was renamed to Syntax Error. About 100 episodes were aired.

This is how the first swedish program Frankerat sounded like which was aired 2000-05-17

• M-P3 (45 MB)

SID?
1981 was the year when the SID sound chip (Sound Interface Device) was blessed to the world, made by Bob Yannes. The goal was to implement a real subtractive synthesis chip and to be totally different from all other home computers at that time. The sound chip with a combination of analog and digital meant that it could in principle create any sound in one or more harmonic waveforms that are sent through a system of filters. No one could predict how this sound chip would become so cult classic. Even today, it is impossible to emulate the sound at 100% accuracy, but the average person may not notice any difference.
SID along with the video graphic chip named VIC-II, was a strong factor the Commodore 64, or also known as the C64 and VIC-64, became the best selling computer of all time with 40% of the home computer market from 1983-1984 and 17 million units sold to the early 90 's. The C64 could also be bought in regular department and toy stores for a relative low cost and was probably one of the reasons of the nearly 97% decline for the large TV-game crash of the second generation video game consoles in North America in 1983.


Demoscenes?
in 1985 a new music market was about to grow. The SID soundchip was also the reason the foundation of the chiptune demoscenes was created. First there were groups who cracked games to make pirated copies. The cracker group had a signature before the game with name and contact information as a kind of bragging moment with both graphics and music. Over time this crack was evolving into a longer sequence initially called intro and later to cracktro where the team displayed their programming skills. It became a strugle over who could best utilize the potential power of Amiga with prettier graphics and more advanced music to eventually tear away and become independent programs, so called demoscenes. During the late 1980s and early 1990s the Commodore 64, Atari ST and Amiga were the main platforms for the demoscenes and a new competition of programming was formed with a real jury. In 1993 the demoscenes also extended to a another platform, MS-DOS based PCs, when the group Future Crew released the demo 2nd Reality.

Annual demo parties are available in all the Nordic countries, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The largest is in Helsinki and is considered to be the finest to win competitions at. Dreamhack is something most people recognize today that used to be the largest demo party. Today, it represents a small part of the Dreamhack which is now mainly a computer game party.
Interesting is that many of the most famous game studios in Nordic started out as a demo groups. For example;
Starbreeze Studios (formerly Swedish demo group Triton Productions)
Digial Illusions (formerly Swedish The Silents)
Remedy Entertainment (formerly Finnish Future Crew)
IO Interactive (formerly Danish Crionics)

In 1987 the Amiga 500 was introduced and became the most popular of all Amiga models from Commodore series. Here is an audio chip named Paula which was able to get the sound even better and more dynamic. The technology on Paula were completely different compared with SID. The technique in this one were FM synthesis where the frequency modulation is used to create sound. One or more waveforms are frequence modulated with one or more other waveforms to create a variable-frequency spectrum.
Although when newer and stronger models came into market, such as the Amiga 1200, they were never as big hit as 500 and in 1993 it it bankruptcy in favor of IBM PC which had a strong growth with better graphics and performance.

Thanks to many enthusiasts, there are still many composers throughout the world to date to help keep the "instrument" alive and a variety of hardware and software/emulators have been developed just to be able to continue creating music in true chip music environment. The chip was meant to be both used in computers and synthesizers, but that did not happen in any synthesizer until 1997 when the SID-based Sid station came to be, created by the Electron company. The demand was high but production of Sidstation-synths ended 2003 as the chips ran out. The uniqueness of the sound chip, whether it be from the C64 or Gameboy, is that it is not processor hungry. That is why it is so popular around the world when you can use a simple non resource intensive unit. Look at the video clip below where it demostrates a Gameboy as the main instrument to create music.
The web page High Voltage SID Collection is housing closer to 47 000 songs, ad growing.

The most well known game musician who created music with SID-chip are among others:
Chris Huelsbeck, Jeroen Tel, Rob Hubbard, David Whittaker, Martin Galway, Ben Daglish, Tim Follin, Geoff Follin, Machinae Supremacy, Mark Cooksey, Chris Cox, John Hare and others.
Some are still active even after 2010 where they play LIVE performances, a great experience for many who had them as role models in their younger days. The year 2015 was the 30th year anniversary.