Exploring Limitations
Mar 12, 2025 - ⧖ 2 minWhen I dabbled - poorly - in composing chiptunes, I took a big interest in using Famitracker to do most of my work. I dove in, inspired by the music I heard in games I played as a kid (pretty much every Mega Man, Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, and Dragon Quest title), and working with Famitracker, I found a great joy in building artistically from a place of limitations.
I could have gotten started with a DAW and a chiptune font pack. I could have started with more sounds and tools than I could count at my fingertips with a deeply helpful UI that was pleasing to the eye and easy to use. Some of it was free, some of it was very expensive. All of it was overwhelming.
Famitracker? Just a bog standard tracker interface. I had never used one, but the limited nature made the vibe easy to get the hang of.
Famitracker emulates the NES' 2A03 chip at its core. 2 square waves. 1 triangle wave. 1 noise channel. 1 DCPM channel. The limitations made experimenting with composition relatively straight-forward.
I will admit, figuring out the nuances of Famitracker was not easy. It took a lot of effort to track down something that passed as a manual (which unfortunately has been lost to the wilds of time), and a lot of experimentation to start creating what I wanted to. There was frustration, but worthwhile frustration, and a lot of fun.
As I would expect many people experience artistic creation to be.
This is the essence of what drew my attention to concepts like Small Web, which in turn, is informing my creative desires for software. Using a limited set of tools, create more than one would expect those tools to be able to accomplish, create something one, can find a reason to be proud of, and do one's level best to ensure the creation is self-sustaining and self-contained.
And when its done? Let the project be done and stand on its own.