DMGo Turns the Original Game Boy Into a Four-Channel Drum Machine

AudioWanderer releases DMGo (Drum Machina Go!), turning Nintendo's original Game Boy sound hardware into a live four-channel drum machine and step sequencer.

Nintendo's original Game Boy has already survived Tetris, Pokémon, chiptune musicians, backlight surgery and several generations of people insisting its screen was perfectly acceptable in 1989. Now AudioWanderer's DMGo — short for Drum Machina Go! — turns the handheld into a dedicated four-channel drum machine and sequencer. Released on September 28, DMGo uses the Game Boy's native sound hardware rather than treating the machine as a novelty-shaped MIDI controller. The handheld provides two pulse channels, one programmable wave channel and one noise channel, which DMGo turns into four sequencing lanes. Users can create patterns through a step sequencer and then abuse them with effects including EKO, STUTTER, DISTORTION and KAOS. Synchronisation features also allow the Game Boy to cooperate with external music hardware, giving a machine launched in 1989 a plausible job in a modern hardware performance setup.

Chiptune software on Nintendo handhelds is hardly new — Little Sound Dj famously built an entire music scene around the Game Boy — but new tools remain interesting because developers continue discovering different interfaces for the same tiny audio architecture. DMGo is particularly focused on rapid rhythm construction and live manipulation rather than functioning as a complete traditional tracker. There is something pleasingly circular about modern musicians spending substantial money recreating crunchy digital sounds while a grey plastic Game Boy sits nearby containing exactly the sort of primitive sound chip everybody once considered a limitation.