MentalEdge, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Trackers were created to take advantage of the new and unique audio hardware available in the Amiga.

Trackers use sample-banks, while both the NES and SNES heavily relied on voice chips.

The NES only had 5 voice channels, and they were each stuck with their initial synth-type, and while SNES could reproduce samples, they were used sparingly due to the space audio samples would take up on the cartridge.

Trackers could create music using actual audio samples. While the samples couldn’t be long or high quality due to RAM and CPU constraints, the way they functioned from the audio systems of the NES and SNES is fundamentally different, and more capable.

While it is possible to re-create the style of music produced by the NES and SNES with a tracker, that’s hardly what they were developed for. Trackers had far fewer technical limitations and could do so much more.