New app lets you turn a Nintendo console into a synth
The SynthNes app allows you to control the console's audio channels with a MIDI instrument of your choice
An app developer has come up with a whole new way for you to use your old Nintendo console.
Avicr's new SynthNes app gives people who've held on to their Nintendo Entertainment System, discontinued many years ago, the ability to turn it into a functioning synthesiser. The app effectively allows users to control the system's five audio channels with a MIDI instrument of their choosing.
The Nintendo Entertainment System can do this because the consoles were sold containing specific sound chips. When they were originally developed, CPU and storage technology was still in its very early days, and so music could only be produced in video games by essentially encoding a set of digital directives for the sound chip to play.
If you want to give it a go for yourself, head over to Avicr's website, where you can pay however much you to access the download link for SynthNes.
Nintendo's more updated systems have seen them continue to maintain a presence in the music world today. In 2020, Gorillaz "performed" a song from their album 'Song Machine' through the Nintendo Switch game Animal Crossing.
