X68000

The VRC6 was made by Konami and was used as an extension soundchip in Nintendo Famicom / NES Games. It was only used in Konami Games and is otherwise known as the Mapper 24.

Technical Specifications

• Channels: 3
• Channel 1-2: Squarewave synthesis with 8 different Duty Cycles
• Channel 3: Sawtooth synthesis
• In-Depth Chip Info written by Kevin Horton can be seen here at NESDev (Link).

Used in

The Chip is used in the following Nintendo Famicom Games (Japan only!)

• Akumajou Densetsu (悪魔城伝説)
• Mouryou Senki Madara (魍魎戦記マダラ)
• Esper Dream 2 Aratanaru Tatakai  (エスパードリーム２ 新たなる戦い)

Nigel Mansell’s World Challenge has the chip on the cartridge, but it does not make use of the sound capabilities.

Esper Dream 2 uses the VRC6

Special Applications

• It’s used together with the 2A03 (The NES / Famicom Main Sound Chip)

Emulation

• NSF | NES Music, aswell as 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).

• There are also NSFe Files. The “e” stands for extended, which means that those files support Titles and Timing.

VRC6 running inside NSFPlug

Music Creation

• VRC6 Music can be created with Famitracker.