What is furnace?

Furnace is a music-making program for a style of music called chiptune, which is music created using the sound chips found in old computers, game consoles, and arcade machines. Instead of playing back samples of instruments the way modern music software does, Furnace talks directly to emulated versions of these old sound chips, so the music comes out sounding like it was made on the original hardware from decades ago. What sets Furnace apart is the sheer number of sound chips it supports. It can emulate chips from the Sega Genesis, Commodore 64, Game Boy, NES, Atari systems, PC Engine, Neo Geo, Nintendo DS, and dozens of other machines, plus several newer chips designed just for this kind of music. Users can mix and match chips within a single project, choosing from over 200 ready-made presets or building custom setups with up to 32 chips and 128 channels combined. Furnace works like a tracker, a type of music editor where notes and effects are typed into a grid rather than played on a virtual piano roll. It includes a wavetable synthesizer for building custom waveforms, a sample editor, MIDI input support, and tools for exporting finished songs as audio files or in formats used by other chiptune software. It can also open and save files from DefleMask, an older tracker, making it useful for people moving projects between the two programs. The software runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and is also available through Flatpak and several Linux package managers. People who want to build it from source can do so using CMake and a C or C++ compiler. Furnace is open source, released under the GPLv2 or later license, so anyone can view, modify, and share the code as long as they keep it open under the same terms.