X68000

The 2A03 (or 2A07 / RP2A07 in Europe and Australia) was made by Ricoh and used inside the Nintendo Entertainment System (Famicom in Japan). Beside being capable of Sound Generation it’s actually the Main CPU of the system.

The RP2A07

Technical Specifications

• Channels: 5
• Channel 1-2: Squarewave Synthesis, variable duty cycle (12.5%, 25%, 50%, and 75%), 16 Volume Levels and Hardware Pitch Bending Support
• Channel 3: Trianglewave Synthesis, 27 Hz – 56 kHz, fixed Volume.
• Channel 4: Noise Synthesis, supports 16 different Frequencies and Volume Levels
• Channel 5: 6-Bit DPCM Sample Playback, 4.2 kHz – 33.5 kHz

Used in

• Capcom Playchoice 10 (Arcade)
• Nintendo Entertainment System / Nintendo Famicom
• Nintendo Vs. Series (Arcade)

Super Mario Bros. gets its sound from the 2A03

Special Applications

• Several Famicom Games had additonal Soundchips built-in. Those so called expansion-chips could be used together with the 2A03 and usually supplied more soundchannels:
  FME-7 / MMC5 / Namco 106 / VRC6 / VRC7

Emulation

• NES / Famicom | NES Music, aswell as music from all the expansion Chips, can be ripped and stored inside .nsf Files. NSF Files are basically stripped down roms that only contain the music code. There are numerous Players for this, 2 popular Winamp Plugins would be NSFPlug (Link) and NEZPlug++ (Link).
• VS. Series | Can be ripped into .nsf files aswell.

• There are also NSFe Files. The “e” stands for extended, which means that those files support Titles and Timing.
• You can also listen to NSFs in Hoot

Music Creation

Trackers

• Famitracker, Nerdtracker

MML

• MCK