Thoughts of an 8-bit wannabe

I have been seriously considering the purchase of a MIDINES, but as I'm about to move house I don't really want to accumulate more nonsense that has to travel around with me.

I do have a Gameboy with a copy of LSDJ and - although it's capable of some truly astonishing noises that emulators still can't touch - I hanker after proper, simple MIDI control so I can actually use it. Like most people, the time I get to spend producing music is pretty limited: I have to be on-target and not messing around for most of it, so a lot of the more wacky sound-design things I'd love to do get sidelined.

Here is what I would actually like, and I'm serious about this: an accurate NES or Gameboy-emulating VST. Sure, there's Magical 8-bit Plug and Pooboy, but they don't allow things like running tables, messing around with waveforms, arp-based sounds or indeed any of the stuff that makes programming a vintage chip-based system so awesome.

Gwem, Jellica, Dubmood and I can argue about this forever, but I think that 90% of what goes into chip music is the sound that the chip is making, and 10% is the use of the retro hardware itself. Of course, there's the wonder and romance of someone bashing out a fantastic track on a Texas Instruments Calculator or whatever, but for the rest of us who care about sound, there's only vague approximations of those wonderful tones.

Fact: none of the existing emulators out there can do half the stuff that LSDJ or Nanoloop can. By far the best chiptune VST is gwem's YMVST, but since he lost the second version (gwem, you're a great dude, but seriously...losing an entire version of one of the greatest VST's ever?) there's not much hope for progress from that direction.

So come on VST-hackers - get busy on a 100% perfect Gameboy emulator - I demand wavetable editing and arps!