Yes, the SY BITS machine works pretty nice for making chiptune sounds! I made some examples in this video, where the whole first section is emulating a Commodore 64 SID chip using three BITS machines (one for each physical SID channel).
In that video I am using some different tricks where some are mentioned above - for example using a square LFO to modulate pitch to create arps. The key is to set the depth to half of the semitones you want to jump, and then compensate by setting TUNE to the same amount thereby providing a good base pitch. So, to create an octave arp you could set LFO to 6.00 and TUNE to -6.00 for instance. If TRIG note is set to C5 it will then create an arp on C4 and C5. You could do other intervals, and also combining with the second LFO to create broader arp chords.
Regarding other sounds I wrote a bit about it here: Introducing Syntakt - #838 by ThomasJ
If enough people are interested in these things I might make a tutorial video some day 
