I made An album of Music for the Megadrive, But this is not a Chiptune Album.

Posted onAuthorFatnick

I should probably get a bit better at announcing stuff long before I release it, but I’ve just released a brand new album: This is Not a Chiptune Album.

Written exclusively for the sound hardware found in a Sega Megadrive, this is not a typical chiptune-sounding album. Instead, it’s just an ordinary album that happens to use the Sega Megadrive/Genesis as its one and only instrument.

What does that mean in practice? Despite fitting within the confines of a 4mb ROM file, the album features 12 tracks and is just shy of 35 minutes long. The tracks themselves span a number of genres and were the result of a number of different influences: taking my daughter to a local pinball club, watching the world go to shit, playing the latest Toejam and Earl game and – most importantly – finding it really funny that the Bishop of St Albans used the phrase ‘lootboxes and skins’ on record.

Currently, the album is live (or will soon be live) on all major streaming services. You can listen to it on Youtube here:

As this is an album written for the Sega Megadrive it presents a couple of exciting possibilities:

  • You can buy it/stream it from your favourite service as you normally would. That’s fine! Thank you for taking the time to listen to my work.
  • BUT if you buy it directly from my store you’ll get the album in both MP3 format AND with the individual VGM files for each track. (you can buy using paypal from here)
  • Finally – and most excitingly of all – there’s the possibility to print the album onto an actual Megadrive cart. Now, doing this is more expensive than simply burning tracks to a CD-R, so I need to gauge interest first. Thanks to Stephane-D’s excellent SGDK and player template I’ve built a player for the album so it really is just a question of getting numbers and getting it manufactured:
Screenshot of the Album ROM

Consequently, if you a little bit of money to spare and would be interested in owning an album on a Sega Megadrive game cartridge, please register interest here:

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Finally, thank yous! A big thank you for Guillaume Tronel for his fantastic cover artwork (I’m now worried the music doesn’t quite do it justice!)

Thank you to my family for putting up with me doing this sort of thing.

Finally, a very legal thank you to Novara Media who were the source of all of my political quotes. I’m not sure i trust their reporting, but its lovely of them to put videos under the Creative Commons attribution share alike license