The term comes from dedicated synth chips such as the C-64’s SID chip and was used for subsequent music in that style. Generally this was simple waveforms, filt

The term comes from dedicated synth chips such as the C-64’s SID chip and was used for subsequent music in that style. Generally this was simple waveforms, filters and fast arpeggiation to approximate chords. An example from The Last Ninja on C64: https://youtu.be/1OjPpVrc3gM https://youtu.be/1OjPpVrc3gM Nearly all scene trackers were basically sample sequencers, not MIDI (excluding rare exceptions such as OctaMED which could send midi events as well.) Chiptune music in the tracker era often meant using a small synth style waveform as the sample so that the music sounded similar to earlier computers. Cracktros with small footprints often did this, example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBv1VHy0Igk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBv1VHy0Igk Early demoscene music was often influenced by Italo Disco and it’s offshoots, which were relatively obscure in the states thanks to the homophobic Disco Sucks movement. ‘Chiptune’ in the early console sense gained popularity a bit later, around the time of the VGmix/OCRemix communities. (As well as the LSDJ NullSleep phase where people danced to Gameboy producers.)