The Chipophone on the outside looks like an old 80’s kind of home organ. Inside though, it’s a whole different story. The organ has been modified to contain a bunch of chips that make it play like an old 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. I guess you could still say it’s an 80’s organ, but in a different sort of 80’s way.
Created by Linus Akesson, the Chipophone has the looks of an old organ, but the brains needed to crank out awesome 8-bit sounds for live chiptune performances. Linus ripped out all of the original tone-generators and wired up keys via a bunch of 74HC165 chips, daisy-chained together to an Atmega88 controller chip. He also wired up the knob potentiometers to the microcontroller’s analog inputs.
The organ is capable of playing all the regular 8-bit sounds that you hear in games allowing it to sound like the Mario Bros theme tune or Tetris theme tune for example.
Check out the video below to see a demonstration of how it works and what can be achieved with it.
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