Sprite Spores

Four register-level chip emulations on one bus — PSG, SID, OPN2 and OPM — plus a fifth lane made of what they leak into each other. Chip DNA crossfades between them.

Sprite Spores — Chip Control — the AY/YM page and its registers

Sprite Spores — Motion — the register sequencer and its 32-step grid

Sprite Spores — Register Bus — five lane frames and the live register image

Perform — Chip DNA, Register Morph, Bus Conflict 01/04

Windows VST3i
AY / SID / OPN2 / OPM
Chip DNA crossfade
Register sequencer
58 presets

Buy on Gumroad ▸ Owner’s manual (PDF)

Four chips run side by side as register-level emulations rather than approximations: the AY-3-8910 and YM2149 PSG, the MOS 6581 and 8580 SID, the Yamaha YM2612, and the YM2151. Pitch quantises the way the real registers quantise it, envelopes step on the real rate counters, and the DAC nonlinearities sit in the signal path. A fifth Ghost lane is not a chip at all — it is bus leakage, contact corrosion and a video-RAM resonator, the sound of the other four bleeding into each other.

Chip DNA is the control the instrument is built around. It is a crossfade rather than a selector: sweep it and the weights move across PSG, SID, FM and Ghost, normalised so the level stays put. Register Morph is separate, and drives how hard the register frame is rewritten — which is what makes the instrument sound written to rather than played. Each lane also carries an Authentic control that blends between a friendlier synth version and the hardware model.

The sequencer does not sequence notes, it sequences the machine: three lanes write values to pitch, level, morph, conflict or ghost, with Euclidean rests, trig conditions, ratchets and a per-step chip pin. Eleven pages cover the chip editors, a drawn wavetable, a chord bus, macro ageing, bitplane damage and an output bus, and the CRT in the middle is a real scope with nineteen display modes — one of which turns it into a live register readout.