Download the Playdate app

The chiptune.cc Playdate player — browse the catalog and listen to real chip music on your Playdate.

Home Now playing Crank-out cover art Browse tracks Playback controls Castlevania (MSX)

How it works — real chip emulation, not pre-rendered audio

This app does not play pre-rendered WAV or MP3 files. It plays the actual bytes from the olden days and synthesizes the sound on your Playdate:

A built-in Z80 CPU emulator runs the original Z80 player program that ships inside each .ay file — the same code the ZX Spectrum / Amstrad CPC ran.
That program writes to a built-in, cycle-accurate AY-3-8910 / YM2149 sound-chip emulator (ayumi), which generates the waveform sample-by-sample — exactly the register writes the real chip received decades ago.
Tracker formats (PT3 / Vortex Tracker, and packed .ay via LHA decompression) are decoded and fed to the same AY core.

So every note you hear is computed on-device from period-accurate chip state — true emulation, not a recording.

Coming soon: a SID (Commodore 64) core, to bring C64 music to the same player.

Sideload instructions

Download the .pdx.zip from the link above.
Sign in at play.date and open Account → Games → Sideload.
Upload the file; it appears under Sideloaded games.
On your Playdate: Settings → Games, then sync to pull it down.
Launch it from the games list and enjoy the tunes.