The first module I will develop for the ChipTuneForever project will be a Sega Genesis Hat. I already have a lot of experience working with the chip, so I'm pretty much set on the hardware side. On the software side, I have some learning ahead of me to do: I'm picturing a simple interface in python that takes arbitrary VGM/VGZ files, parses and decompresses them, and pipes the appropriate instructions to the sound chips on the Hat.

I have finished the first prototype and sent the board off to production. Once the board is back in I'll assemble it and start writing the interface code. Currently the chips are accessible using the Raspberry Pi's SPI interface, which allows for ( as I've read ) up to 125MHz on the SCLK line, which according to the 74AHCT595 datasheet is definitely doable. This will keep the sound chips fed fast enough to maintain a 44.1KHz sample rate (the rate at which VGM files are played).