Woo boy, this one's a doozy.

This is the second attempt at an MSX/SCC+ cover, that I started last night and finished minutes before uploading this lol. It's rare that a cover I finish so quickly is one I'm so proud of, but it believe it, cuz it happened.

The first attempt was around September of 2021, where I was making a pretty promising attempt with TriloTracker, a program that runs on the MSX computer itself (I had to emulate with openMSX), and is honestly really cool. It's quite powerful, and it's shockingly usable, though not at all intuitive or straightforward, you have to read the manual quite a lot to know how to use it.

Apart from the fact it only lets you navigate the UI with the keyboard, it also has no options, at least as far as I could tell, for automatically modulating a wavetable synth. If I wanted the bass to have a bit of clang, I would have to, by hand, draw up dozens of individual waveforms to switch between later, manually, with nothing but the goddamn arrow keys. Suffice to say, it really wasn't the best solution, so I put it down, and didn't return to the idea for ages.

In the years since, I've discovered Furnace, and watched it get so good that it's now my primary chiptune tracker, and one of its biggest draws for me was the allure of being able to make MSX/SCC music with a bloody mouse as well as a keyboard lol. Which made drawing up waveforms much easier, and Furnace's own feature like the "Synthesister" were really cool to play around with.

Idk why it's called that, cuz it's not actually a synthesister, and is actually more of an effects/LFO tool that you apply to waveforms and instruments that you've already made or imported. Using it is how I got a slight clang to the bass without having to draw shitloads of waveforms (that is, apart from the bass solo towards the end, that was done with two layered and detuned sounds).

It's also how I got the chords to have a slight modulation to them, which is meant to mimic the slight FM operator detune that the original version has, as well as give them a bit more life.

I had a lot of fun screwing around with the MSX/SCC, it's certainly a combo I'll be returning to in the future, especially since Furnace makes it easier than its ever been to squeeze out its full potential. The ease of which it lets you design complex sounds on an otherwise simple chip is insane, I actually can't believe I made it sound like this haha

Hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I did making it! ^^

[MSX\SCC+] - Bosconian (X68K): "Blast Power !"

Hey ho there, I make the chippy and non-chippy bois!!/??1/

Avi: @KayllaCat on Twitter

Chippy Toolz:
Furnace
FamiTracker 0.4.6
FastTracker II (FT2 Clone)
Milkytracker
OctaMED Sound Studio 1.03c (OctaMED V7)
OctaMED V4

Non-chippy toolz:
FL Studio 21
Renoise

New tracks tagged #MSX + SCC