These are the first things that leap to mind when attempting to enumerate my favorite chiptunes:
- Highscore (Adlib), composed by Drax and Metal of Vibrants for the game Lollypop, but not used. I peeked at the 'source' in Edlib so I could play it on piano. Too bad there isn't a longer version. [mp3]
- Breaking Wind (Adlib), another by Drax/Metal. I'm not normally fond of the OPL2, but these guys really make it sing. [mp3]
- Azzdjazz (C64), by PRI. His masterpiece. There's several others I like by him as well - Going_Round.sid, Rainbow_Shuffle.sid, Short_and_Sweet.sid, Soundwave.sid, and Sweet_and_Sour.sid are runners up.
- AcidJazzed Evening (C64) by Glenn Gallefoss, a sidtune remake of this mod file. I discovered this gem during the controversy involving a certain famous producer. I'm not sure which version I prefer.
- Weather_Girl.sid (C64) by Alien.
- A Juicy Doodle (C64) by Hein Holt is somewhat unsettling.
- Commando (C64) by the famous Rob Hubbard, rocks out like nothing before or since. See also: "Commando Jackson" (not an easy file to find).
- The Ballblazer theme. This is a tricky one - the SID version is inferior, and the SAP (Pokey) version I've found is 50 Hz, which ruins the whole thing, and it wouldn't play correctly anyway. My solution was to let the game run for 36 minutes in an emulator at the correct (NTSC) frequency, recording it to a wave file. Wave files of emulated chiptunes compress surprisingly well using standard lossless compression, due to the absence of noise and uniformity of waveforms. Wikipedia claims the melody is algorithmically generated -- some day I'll disassemble it to see for myself.
I could list more, but I think I'm already cheating by including music from well-known games. Time to get my players in order and find another list worth of tunes. Kohina is a start.