What is Chipgrid

Chipgrid is a musical instrument you program while it plays. The program is a grid of letters and numbers. Every sixteenth note, each letter reads its neighbours and writes a result below itself. Some letters count, some pick notes, some travel across the grid, and some play a sound or draw on the screen when something touches them.

The sound comes from an emulated sound chip like the NES’s: two pulse waves, a triangle and a noise channel. Four voices, no more. The picture is a 160 × 120 screen with the old palettes (NES, Commodore 64, Game Boy, CGA). Nothing appears on it unless the grid draws it.

Open Chipgrid ↗

It runs in the browser, on a computer or a phone, with nothing to install. The first time you open it, the tutorial starts.

What you see

• The grid, on the left: your program. The orange box is the cursor. Colours tell what each cell is: logic, movers, sound and screen each have their own, and an empty input shows as ·, where an operator is listening.
• The screen, top right: what your code draws.
• Four meters under it: one per voice of the chip (pulse 1, pulse 2, triangle, noise). When a fifth note takes a busy voice, its meter shows STEAL.
• Four tabs under the meters:
  • Cell explains whatever is under the cursor: what it is, what it reads, what it is outputting right now.
  • Tutorial follows the current chapter.
  • Manual has a page for every operator, with an example to load.
  • Why 8-bit? tells the history.
• The top bar: play, tempo (BPM), volume, zoom, the TUTORIAL and EXAMPLES menus, recording, and the file buttons. See Keys.

On a phone, a key pad at the bottom gives you the operators, the notes and the numbers.

Where to start

1. The tutorial. Twenty short chapters. You type everything yourself, glowing cells show where, and each step moves on when it is right. Read along in The tutorial, chapter by chapter.
2. The examples. 86 programs to load, listen to and take apart: songs, rhythms, visuals, routes, code that is also a picture. They are all in the Examples section, ready to open.
3. The guides in this documentation explain the ideas one at a time: how the grid works, then sound, drawing, routes and gates and links.
4. The reference lists every operator, with its inputs, its history and an example.

Where it comes from

Chipgrid was made for 8-bit workshops: people make chip music and pixel pictures from scratch, with no software to install and no music theory needed. Its language is inspired by Orca, the live-coding grid by Hundred Rabbits, but its operators are its own, made for the sound chips and screens of the 1980s.

A multiplayer version puts up to ten people on one big shared grid, on a laptop and the room’s Wi-Fi.