GameBoy Music Making

GameBoy - a studio in your pocket!

Two kickarse music programs have been written for the original GameBoy (by Nintendo - released in 1989).

Nanoloop is a fun fun fun in the sun (because the screen isn't backlit so you have to work in the light) piece of software. A really neat original interface will get you making very groovy beats and sounds straight away. Limited for serious music making, but well worth the price ... if you could still buy it. Perhaps they might one day release the ROM image so you can make your own copy which leads me onto the other software...

LSDJ (Little Sound DJ) by Johan Kotlinski
This well and truly rocks and is THE tool for composing on the GameBoy, a fully featured tracker with sampled drum kits. One buys a subscription to the program - once bought you can download forever updates. The tricky bit is getting it onto a cartridge.
You need a backup system - it reads gameboy cartridges and puts the information in your computer and vice versa. The system I bought was the Transferer from EMS in Hong Kong. The cartridge was faulty - I returned it never to hear from them again. (Rumour has it that this product is out of production. There looks like a very good system called the ????? available from ????? or ??????. A cheaper option is the PC-Linker system available from ????. Note that these products and companies are beautifully mercurial, if these links don't work give me an email and I'll give an update.
To synch LSDJ to MIDI at the time of writing a certain wonderful Mister Firestarter has finished succesfully testing his synch hardware. Keep checking his site to see when it goes into production. Very sweeeet indeed!

GameBoy Camera
Props to Ki Ki Ill for putting me onto this! The GameBoy camera is the quickest , easiest and cheapest way to be belting out a GameBoy hit. Huh? Yep - there is a space game in the software, when one shoots the spaceship on the far right in the first wave you go to a synth/sequencer program. Extremely powerful at programming the synth but unfortunately what you program is only one measure long. Do get it though - it will keep you amused for weeks and can be found from most pawnbrokers for next to nothing. Plus the camera is really really cool.

Back to My Other Tools of Pleasure