Please help me with the pros and cons of different chiptune formats

Please help me with the pros and cons of different chiptune formats

Spring Spring's picture

Hi, so I've started making games again, but I'm having some doubts about the soundtrack; specifically, what format would be best for playback, and would like to hear people's thoughts about it. The formats I've tried so far and the pros and cons I see with them are:

.ogg (Digital Audio):

  • Pros: Flexibility, can be played back by anything, good performance
  • Cons: Size increases hugely with quality and length of a song, can't set loop point, really boring to make (imo)

.mod, .it: (Tracked format, originally Amiga)

  • Pros: Easy to integrate into games, good performance
  • Cons: Based largely around pitchshifting of samples, so can't replicate synth sounds that well

.sid: (C64)

  • Pros: Best sound imo, very small size
  • Cons: Hard to find a reliable playback method

.nsf: (NES/Famicom)

  • Pros: Easy enough to find a way of playing back
  • Cons: Undesirable sound quality compared to the sid (imo); virtually every other chiptune game uses this format

.a2m, .rad: (AdLib)

  • Pros: Very small size
  • Cons: Hard to create decent instruments (for me at least), they all sound really harsh and jarring

.vgm (Sega Genesis/Mega Drive)

  • Pros: Easy enough to play back
  • Cons: Undesirable sound quality compared to the sid (imo)

(I actually have a feeling that the last two formats might be able to produce what I desire with some advanced techniques which I don't know about :P)  Do you have any thought about this?   Are you perhaps aware of some sort of modern "custom chiptune format" I could use, especially?  -Thanks in advance!  ~Spring