PAPU

What it does

An emulator of the Game Boy sound chip, laid out as three sound sets: two pulse channels with selectable pulse width and a noise channel without it. Each set has attack, release, tune and fine tune, its own left and right switches for placing it in the stereo field, and shift and sweep controls that slide the pitch into laser and explosion noises. A voices knob takes the first two sets from mono into polyphonic playback.

In the demo

Jade plays it from a hardware keyboard, stacking instances in GarageBand for a Game Boy game theme and an original chiptune piece, then walks each control on a single held note so the change is audible. She also locks one instance to a pentatonic scale using Scaler as a MIDI controller.

Worth knowing

It ships with no presets, though patches save inside the plugin, and the interface will not fill the screen in GarageBand. The developer’s site carries free desktop versions of this and other chip emulators.