Nanoloop cheat sheet

Reference

Facts#

• It predates lsdj, and was the thing to beat. johan-kotlinski tried it "before LSDj existed" and found it "a beat making toy rather than something I would like to make full songs in"; his own milestone for LSDj's adoption is the 3.0.0 file screen, "after which LSDj started to become as popular as Nanoloop" (source: s-chipmusic-kotlinski-interviews).
• The interface is a grid, not a tracker's note column — the screenshot in little-scale's 2009 post shows the familiar 4×4 pattern grid running under KiGB (source: s-little-scale-nanoloop-18-tet).
• What it does that LSDj does not: "Nanoloop can do hard sync and soft pulse, LSDj cannot" (Biere Gratuite). The counter-position in the same thread, from herr_prof: "There is nothing you can do in nanoloop that cant be done in lsdj, except you actually have to know what you are doing" (source: s-chipmusic-tables-and-chords-threads). Both stand.
• ROM internals, version 1.3d (nl13d.gb, read from a hex-editor screenshot): the ROM is 32,768 bytes and the pitch lookup table is 144 bytes at $730A (29,450) — 72 entries against lsdj's 108. Its stock contents are byte for byte the same 12-TET-from-C2 period series LSDj uses, because both drive the same game-boy-apu registers (source: s-little-scale-nanoloop-18-tet). Patching it is rom-retuning; little-scale's 18-TET Nanoloop is the wiki's first worked example.
• Sampled and cut into kits. little-scale released 44 kick sounds recorded from Nanoloop 1.6.3 on a grey DMG (2012, unrestricted), and made a Nanoloop 2.3 kit for lsdj in 2009 — the two programs raiding each other (sources: s-little-scale-chip-sample-packs, s-little-scale-lsdj-kit-releases).
• Sync, at pin level: Nanoloop listens on the link connector's SI (serial in) pin, where lsdj listens on SC (serial clock) — the reason a sync box can support one and not the other. Ground to ground and one wire is the whole connection; 2.x needs a series resistor on SI where 1.x does not. Its clock rate is 12 ppqn, half of MIDI beat clock's 24, so a MIDI→Nanoloop box is a divider — which is why the cheapest one is a single $1 4017 decade counter with no microcontroller at all (sources: s-little-scale-arduino-gameboy-sync-boxes, s-little-scale-teensy-usb-midi-sync, s-little-scale-1-dollar-nanoloop-sync; see sync). A commenter puts the rate in context: his Boss DR-110 "uses essentially the same 12ppq sync signal as nanoloop".
• Oliver Wittchow sold a Nanoloop MIDI sync cable — "basically a cable with a small area for the chip in the middle", powered from the Game Boy connector, which also syncs lsdj in MIDI sync mode. Premade units had stopped by October 2008 with a kit promised (source: s-little-scale-sync-options-for-game-boys).
• It could not do triplets, and that was worth building hardware for: little-scale's nanoGroover "generate[s] weird timings for Nanoloop like 2:4, 3:4, 5:4 and 6:4. Finally, you can do triplets in Nanoloop!" — at the cost of two Game Boys and two copies of Nanoloop. His nanoSync24 clocks Nanoloop from a Sync24 signal, "so that the C64 is controlling the speed of Nanoloop" (source: s-little-scale-sync-options-for-game-boys).
• Sync: Nanoloop's clock signal is one of the standard Game Boy sync formats, sitting beside LSDj sync, MIDI clock and DIN sync in scannerboy's C64 user-port adapter for defmon (LSDj sync, nanoloop sync, MIDI clock, DIN sync and a 24–2 ppqn analogue clock; 36 EUR, first batch 2015-03-07) — so a Nanoloop cartridge can clock or be clocked by a C64 (sources: s-defmon-wiki-sync-and-stereo, s-chipmusic-defmon-thread). little-scale ran Nanoloop and LSDj off one MIDI clock in 2008 (sync; the posts are listed in inbox/scout-little-scale-2026-08-31.md, not yet ingested).

Techniques