Wednesday on TechStuff, we talked about chiptunes, a musical movement that uses the sounds made famous in classic video games. It’s called chiptunes because the old consoles had dedicated chips that created the sounds you’d hear in video games. Those chips had a limited number of channels (or distinct voices) as well as a set range of tones and pitches they could produce. Some of the best video game music composers saw these features not as limitations but as challenges. And some of the most memorable video game themes trace their origins back to this era.

There are different approaches to making music through chiptunes. You can hack old chips and make hardware capable of playing music. Or you can hack devices like the Nintendo Gameboy to play music live. There are emulators that reproduce the sounds created by music chips, letting you use a standard computer to create music evocative of the old 8-bit video game days. And there’s no shortage of artists out there — just check out these YouTube clips.

Chris talked about a guy with the handle Pixelh8, who modified a Gameboy to let him mix and loop music on the fly live. Here’s a video he made back in 2008 that demonstrates his musical skills:

I talked about Linus Akesson’s invention, the Chipophone. It’s a modified electric organ that plays chiptune sounds live, giving him the ability to play classic video game tunes at the drop of a hat:

And remember that 8-bit guitar we talked about? Yup, there’s a video for that too:

We also talked about converting music into chiptunes formats. Here’s part one of the clever 8-bit reinterpretation of Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog as if it were an NES game:

And finally, no meme is safe from the chiptunes makeover. Revel in the glorious 8-bit version of Trololo!

Enjoy the music and keep up with TechStuff on Twitter and Facebook.