Deflemask - Sega Genesis FM Tracker for PC

Anyone using this? Anyone know how to make bassdrums using the FM engine rather than samples? I guess you use the effects section in the sequencer. 

You can get a pretty good result by using the default instrument preset. Turn off OP3&4 and turn the decay of OP1 to around 25 (this operator will be the percussive part of the 'kick'), and adjust the decay of Op2 to however much you want the tone part of the bass drum to come through

This looks really good.  Makes me want to get an NES flash cart.  For Genesis-y stuff, I have a Yamaha FB-01 lying around and other than the PCM drum channel that's pretty close to the same sound (closer to the Sega arcade machines than the Genesis since it's almost the same chip - again, the PCM channel is the only real difference) and that was like half the price of a good flash cart last time I checked, even if I didn't already have one.

But for NES this thing looks like the way to go, and my old NES from when I was little still works perfectly.  Famitracker was always too basic to justify the cost of a flash cart, and the MidiNES I traded a homemade fuzz pedal for back in the 2000s was always too buggy to really be practical.  Stuck notes all the time, and you had to manually do all of your envelopes with CC automation.  This looks perfect.

And all of that's assuming that you want it for hardware, the emulation sounds great in the examples I listened to, haven't had time to actually try it.

As far as FM bass drums I've never been great at FM drum programming but in general, you'd probably want to use two operators with a fast amplitude envelope to create a click (have one modulating the other and just tweak the ratio between them by ear until you get noise - some feedback would help, too) and a third with a fast attack somewhat slower decay (no sustain, release set to the same value as the decay, so it will act the same whether you send it a sustained note or just a quick tap from a pad - unless you want to do sustained 808-style kicks, in which case maybe make the decay longer than the release) on the amplitude plus an envelope with a fast attack and medium release (similar but not necessarily the same as the amplitude envelope) to give you the tone component of the kick.  Maybe use the fourth operator to modulate the third slightly to give it a sort of distortion type thickness, or alternatively use the fourth in parallel with the third and detune them a bit (or use slightly different pitch envelopes for each one) for more of a chorusing effect.

That's jsut off the top of my head though, the specific way you'd implement it would depend on the architecture, I'm assuming the Genesis instrument editor in this is pretty much a standard Yamaha 4op synth editor since the Genesis chip was more or less a polyphonic DX-27 IIRC.

I'd love an inbuilt infinite automation lane synth for renoise

there's also genMDM which has recently been resurrected by Catskull Electronics:

https://catskullelectronics.com/genmdm

It's a cart + interface that allows you to sequence the megadrive/genesis soundchip via MIDI. I don't know much else about it but I'll probably eventually get one and do a video..