Game music can be a powerful source of nostalgia. Some hear blips and bloops from Sonic the Hedgehog and get a wave of memories, while others might get inspired to create their own music. Synth makers Abraham and Maria got curious. Very curious.
When they stumbled on a pack of video game music files (VGM) from almost every game on the 16-bit Sega Genesis (aka Mega Drive), they started wondering about the connections, similarities, patterns in the notes.
They wanted to learn how the system’s Yamaha YM2612 chip created iconic sounds. But beyond that, they wanted to find the patterns and connections between sounds.
Chiptune enthusiasts take note.
But what if, instead of hearing them as isolated tracks, we explored them as a complete landscape? What if we treated presets not as sounds, but as data that tells stories?
DAFMExplorer was born from that question: the idea that FM synthesis and data science can coexist—not to explain the past, but to open new creative doors.
We wanted to understand how these sounds worked not as individual presets, but as a system. What patterns emerged when you looked at thousands of them together? Could you hear the invisible connections between a bass from Streets of Rage and a lead from Sonic? Was there something in the parameters themselves that told a story about the composers, the tools they used, the regions they came from?
The YM2612/YM3438 chip—the heart of the Sega Genesis—wasn’t just a sound generator. It was a creative instrument that shaped an entire generation of game music. Every preset is a snapshot of a composer’s choices: which algorithm to use, how much feedback, what attack rate, what detune. These aren’t random numbers. They’re creative decisions frozen in time.
But to see those patterns, you need to step back. You need to look at the forest, not just the trees. That’s where data science comes in—not as a replacement for listening, but as a new way of hearing.
You can read even more about it on their blog.
In the end, they discovered seven “sonic realms” on the system, which they hadn’t found before experimenting.
Tagging and organizing all the data was a feat, especially considering they were working with more than 93,000 sound presets. Fortunately for the community, the results of all that effort are available on the well-documented DAFMExplorer GitHub, so if you want to explore the data locally, you can.
For those who want a simpler route, there’s a web app where you can play with and download sounds.
The app includes a searchable map of all sounds. You can explore by types (eg. Fantasy Atmospheres or Neon Action), or filter by game or composer. If you wanted to compose a chiptune using only sounds by Sonic composer Masato Nakamura, or only notes from Mortal Kombat II, you just set the filters and jam. Once presets for the six slots are selected, they can be downloaded and played directly on the DAFM SYNTH Genesis hardware or the chiptune tracker DefleMask.
This is a great resource for those wanting to learn more about video game history, and how composers worked with the hardware constraints of yesteryear.
If you want to explore something more tangible, you could build your own Space Invaders Synthesizer. If you need more chiptunes in your life, explore our retro playlist from Make: Volume 89.
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