HoustonTracker 2 Turns Your Texas Instruments Graphing Calculator Into A Chiptunes Synth & Sequencer

Free Music SoftwareHoustonTracker 2 is a free app that turns your Texas Instruments graphing calculator into a chiptunes synth + sequencer.

HousetonTracker is a music editor/sequencer for the Texas Instruments TI-82, TI-83/82STATS, and TI-83+/84+/SE. It allows you to compose and play multi-channel 1-bit music directly on your TI graphic calculator.

Features:

  • 3 tone channels
  • 1 non-interrupting drum channel
  • up to 128 note patterns
  • up to 64 drum/fx patterns
  • sequence length up to 255 pattern rows
  • 16-bit frequency precision
  • 8-bit speed precision, can be configured per step
  • various effects, including:
    • L/C/R stereo hard-panning for tone and drum channels
    • 8bit duty cycle control
    • duty cycle sweep
  • 2 user definable samples
  • up to 8 savestates
  • edit during playback

HoustonTracker 2 is free and open source and is available to download from the project site.

13 thoughts on “HoustonTracker 2 Turns Your Texas Instruments Graphing Calculator Into A Chiptunes Synth & Sequencer

    1. The chip does not have synthesis parameters. The software does. The thing that makes HoustonTracker impressive is that the calculator does not have sound at all. The software generates ALL sound, rendering it on-the-fly, and then uses the link port for sound output by twiddling bits of (presumably) a register somewhere.

      1. The only output the TI calcs have is the TTL level link port. So it would be fairly lo-fi PWM, which can actually sound pretty good with some filtering.

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