VIDEO: Making music with Gameboy, Nintendo DS, & Pico Tracker

Hi all!

My latest video is all about making music on the Nintendo Gameboy, the Nintendo DS, as well as the Xiphonics Pico Tracker. I cover so much in the video that I felt like it only made sense for me to write a blog post just to provide all of the details. Everything below is going to be super technical, so only read it if you are interested in recreating something from the video.

Nintendo Game Boy

The software I used in the video was LSDJ, which can be downloaded here. You can run it in a Gameboy emulator on your computer or on an actual Game Boy. When I use an emulator, I use Sameboy.

By the way, there's a great user manual for LSDJ here.

The cartridge I've been using with my real Gameboy can be purchased new here. I should mention that I bought one for way less on eBay.

Once I had the cartridge, I put LSDJ on my computer using this software. I found that it only worked really reliably on Windows. For some reason, the Mac version resulted in some sort of data corruption.

VST Plugins

This wasn't featured in the video, but a great plug-in for generating Gameboy-like sounds is Magical 8bit Plug. It's free, lightweight, and a lot of fun to use.

Nintendo DS

In order to use homebrew software on my Nintendo DSi, I followed this tutorial.

Jailbreaking can sometimes result in an unusuable device, so definitely follow the advice in the video at your own risk. That being said, I had good luck. Once, I had modded/jailbroken my DS, I was able to installed NitrousTracker, which can be found here.

LittleGPTracker (aka Little Piggy Tracker)

LittleGPTracker is a clone of LSDJ that was designed to work on various handheld devices. Unlike, LSDJ, which was built to work with the Gameboy's built in sound chip, LGPTracker uses 16-bit samples to generate sound. It was created in 2006 by is now maintained here by Github user djdiskmachine.

PicoTracker

The PicoTracker is a small custom device that runs a custom version of LittleGPTracker. It also has MIDI inputs and outputs. In order to build my PicoTracker, I bought the following parts:

• The Pico Tracker PCB kit from Xiphonics

• The 3D-printed case from Dead Cactus Labs

• This screen (make sure you choose the Color option that says "IPS Screen No Touch")

• This battery

• These keys

• These keycaps

• These microSD cards

There's a complete build guide here. The project required a bit of basic soldering, although not a great deal. Once I had finished making the device, all I had to do was put the latest version of the software on it from here.

There's also a very active Discord sever for the project here: https://discord.gg/F9nhkd7qj2

I've been very happy with mine so far, although I will say that the software it runs is very much still under development, so expect bugs as well as bug fixes.

OK. I think that's it. Have fun!

– Dave