When playing audio on an Arduino there are several projects you come across. The ease of use or writing your own tunes might be challenging with those projects if you have never made one complete tune on a chiptracker or at least you are able to compose your own songs the analog way with pen and paper. But anyways the demos are just awesomely cool.
An Arduino can do more then just beepin’ ‘n buzzin’ one note after each other. I have found some really cool projects that are able to elict real chiptune jewels from this little MCU.
Bassdll Library
Drew wrote a library to use several piezo buzzers to play tunes with the Arduino. Sadly the notes are all hardcoded and you really need to know what you are doing. Unfortunately this is not my playstyle as a professing copy&paster. A converter from midi to bassdll library converter would be really cool and could push this lib to new heights. Imagine chiptune with a nicely packaged Arduino Chiptune Box. And if we’re on it there are pins left for the ESP8266.
Music start at 3:10
The Hardware Chiptune Project
Not specifically an Arduino is used here but the hardware an Arduino is made out of. So simply uploading the sketch and attaching a buzzer works out. Linus, while on it, also wrote a small chiptracker. Because, why not? Check out the video from 2007 (!) and don’t complain about the video compression. It was 2007. Like 100 years ago where bandwidth was a tale of the future. Even in the scandinavian countries. Oh yeah I nearly forgot, the sketch is available in C but also in ASM if this easy peasy noobish C only raises a weary smile in your face.
Check out his page http://www.linusakesson.net/hardware/chiptune.php