The Chromasound is a music player that can play original video game soundtracks. Instead of playing prerecorded audio, the Chromasound uses FM synthesis to generate sound in real time. While it can play small prerecorded audio samples, it generally takes a musical note as input and produces a custom sound at that pitch. In other words, it plays sheet music using programmable instruments.

The Chromasound receives instructions to play notes using different instruments at different times, and executes those instructions using FM synthesis hardware from either the SEGA Genesis or ASCII MSX2 entertainment console. The instructions are read from a VGM file.