ty! wanna say six easy hours in Furnace for casino machine, handfuls of minutes at a time when I could find the time, a few late nights w the speaker on my shoulder; probs doable in four hours, mb three, but I like having a night of sleep between start and finish!
just checked; Furnace has presets! usually I just make my own instruments. all of casino machine is raw fm and pulse except the snare sample! one sample only. after hearing what Abstract 64 does with raw fm only I eased up on the kick samples. only one channel for standard Sega Genesis does samples; if I do fm kick, it's easier to let the snare samples ring out without having to step on their tails
and YES on sound design capability w Furnace! no real eq, compressor, or lots of standard DAW tools yet the sound design capacity is thru the roof. gotta go w the newest A64 track at time of writing afaik as a huge example of what can be done w Furnace
and totally; go for it w trackers! OpenMPT's free, same w Furnace; OpenMPT does more w samples. Dn-FamiTracker, also free, does NES and just feels right to me, like a home base, like the computer version of being able to go to the acoustic guitar. boiling everything down to two pulses, one triangle, and one noise channel can be relieving. feels like I barely scratched the surface w Klystrack and Sunvox. and ofc there's Renoise! if I'm not in Furnace I'm probs in Renoise