Chiptune tools on MacOS Catalina

Most chiptune tools are made for Windows (or an actual retro machine), but if you’re unlucky enough be on a Mac, like I am for work, here’s what to do to get a couple of the main ones running.

OpenMPT / ModPlug Tracker can load/save many different module formats (and MIDI) so can act as a kind of Rosetta Stone of modules.

Famitracker is a go-to tool for writing for the NES / Famicom console.

We’re going to do stuff in the terminal. Anything that looks like this is a command to paste & run.

First, you need Wine

1. You need brew: if brew -v tells you a Homebrew version number you’re ready, otherwise: /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)" installs it.

2. Use Brew to install Wine brew install wine-stable gets the main release.

3. next run wine64 and you’ll probably get a message like ““Wine Stable.app” cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified.” which is more Apple bullshit.

4. Go to System Preferences -> Security -> General and you should see ““Wine Stable.app” was blocked […]“. Just click Open Anyway and then Open. A window saying it’s doing some setup might appear

OpenMPT

1. You will need a 64 bit version of ModPlug. For use in Wine on Catalina, only the “experimental” retro build with Win XP support works for me.¹ Get it here.

2. Back to the terminal, cd to the directory you unzipped Modplug to, e.g. cd ~/Downloads/openmpt-retro-winxp-amd64-1.30.01.00-r16291 or whatever

3. wine64 OpenMPT.exe you’ll get a (series of?) similar message(s) as in step 3 of the Wine section above, so repeat the process in step 4 to unblock ModPlug and the .dlls it needs to run.

4. Should see the splashscreen now & then you’re ready to rok.

Famitracker

1. You will need a 64 bit version of Famitracker. Currently only the fork Dn-Famitracker provides a 64 bit release. (Marked x64 in the list of files.)

2. cd to the Release directory inside the directory you unzipped Dn-Famitracker to, e.g. cd ~/Downloads/Dn-FamiTracker_v0300_x64/Release or whatever.

3. wine64 Dn-FamiTracker.exe you’ll get a similar message as in step 3 of the Wine section above, so repeat the process in step 4 to unblock Famitracker

4. Lastly,² in Famitracker you should see a warning at the bottom left “Warning! Audio buffer underrun”. Go to File -> Configuration… -> Sound and raise the buffer length until this is cleared. about 100ms works for me.