LSDJ

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LSDJ, Little Sound Disk Jockey, is a homebrewed cartridge for the Nintendo Game Boy, programmed by Johan Kotlinski (known to the chiptune world as Role Model), that enables the user to sequence and program music on a Game Boy. The LSDJ is primarily used by chiptune artists, however it is also popular with many other musicians for writing songs featuring Game Boy sounds. The official cartridges were clear purple or blue and had the trademark LSDJ logo on the top-front.

The sequencer of LSDJ has a very open structure. It was designed to leave all the musical possibilities of the Game Boy in the hands of the user.

The Game Boy sound chip offers four channels with 4-bit sound. Custom waveforms can be created by free-hand drawing, or by using a subtractive synthesizer with resonant filters. For extra versatility, LSDJ also contains an arpeggiator. In terms of samples, LSDJ boasts a set of 59 phonemes for programmable speech. It also features drum kits sampled from the Roland TR-606, TR-707, TR-727, TR-808, TR-909, CR-78, CR-8000, DR-55, DR-110, E-mu Drumulator, Korg KR-55, Oberheim DMX, Ace Tone RhythmAce, Sequential Circuits TOM and LinnDrum drum machines.

Commercial production of LSDJ units had been placed on indeterminate hiatus since the end of 2002 through November of 2007; however, the LSDJ became available for sale once again at Blip Fest 2007 for the price of 75 dollars (including a manual version edited in may of 2007. As well as buying the hard copy a ROM image is downloadable from the LSDJ website for $1.00. A demo of the ROM (an outdated version in which saving is disabled) is available for free. The ROM can be placed onto a rewritable cartridge from one of the various backup devices made for the Game Boy.

It is extremely difficult to get hold of one of the GameBoy LSDJ cartridges but is well worth it if you manage to get hold of one.

It is also possile for the chiptune artist to use the tracker on newer versions of nintendo gameboys via use of a free program called Goomba, the goomba program is an emulator that enables the forward compatabilty of the lsdj rom image.

This is then mounted on a flash card which is user programmable to enable the program to work on the Game Boy Advance or Nintendo DS systems.

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