This is awesome

Did somebody miss the front page of Sonic Retro? =P

Regardless, this is awesome.

 

I was just listening to this on the front page.

I feel special. :v:

 

Already downloaded it, quite a treat. Sonic 2 and 3&K have the best soundtracks in the series. 3&K still sounds spectacular even in NES format.

 

I thought we'd already established that most of us don't read the front page.

Nonetheless, I came when I listened to this.

 

Sounds great on NES. A testament to the true quality of the Sonic 3 and Knuckles soundtrack.

 

Yeah, but with serious restrictions. First, this soundtrack uses additional audio channels provided by a mapper chip (the VRC6) that was only used in a couple of Japanese games, so good luck finding one of those. Also, The NES, unlike the Famicom, doesn't play such extra audio without a modification. So in order to get this to play on an actual NES you need to get a rare Japanese game, a Famicom-to-NES converter, and mod your NES to properly channel the sound. Not very easy/cheap. Maybe the PowerPak can play it though (it plays NSF, but I'm not sure if this mapper is implemented), but you still have to mod the console.

 

oh my god I'm in love. I wish each loop was longer though, I just start getting into a groove and it's onto the next one.

edit: I missed the download... wow this is so much cooler now. I'll be listening to this for months!

 

>125 MB

Sign me up! I don't care if it takes three hours. So worth it. Delicious chip tunnnes. :3

 

I've been subscribed to this guy for months now. :v: I love his version of Flying Battery Zone. <3

 

Fuck yeah, I just put all the songs on my iPod. Listening to 8-bit S3&K tunes makes everything better.

Speaking of being subscribed to this guy, I need to go do that.

 

Hella fuckin' balls-to-the-wall awesome. Astonishing how faithful these are, and I'm hearing some sounds here that I didn't know the NES was even capable of; did the VRC6 have some limited sampling capabilities, or what? As an aside, I like how they were kind enough to blame Patrick Spaziante for the terrible cover art. What era of Spaz did they draw inspiration from? It sure as hell wasn't the right one.

 

Now someone make the NES converted game to go with it!

 

I actually agree, it sounds Way to complex to be an 8-bit NES soundtrack. Though I'm not sure about the Master System sound capabilities.

 

Damn dude.....that is awesome! DLing this when I get home (I.e. good internet).

Although Hincy and I did make an Angel Island Act 2 NES years ago

 

According to this documentation it provides 2 extra square wave channels (the NES already has 2) and a sawtooth channel (the NES doesn't have any). The songs are still very impressive IMO, even considering the extra channels.

AFAIK, the Master System is inferior to the NES when it comes to sound. IIRC, The SMS has 4 channels: 3 square waves and 1 noise, while the NES has 5 channels: 2 square waves, 1 triangle wave, 1 noise, and 1 (D)PCM. The SMS not having a (D)PCM channel means it can't play samples unless CPU-intensive tricks are used on the square channels (which excludes the possibility of playing them during gameplay, restricting the effect to static screens). The triangle channel makes the instruments sound more different from each other on the NES, as does the control over the duty cycle of the square waves, which I don't think the SMS has.

Considering how complex these songs are, I doubt that there is much CPU time left for the game itself... Not that I believe that a 1:1 conversion would be possible anyway. =)

 

Knew about this before the Retro front page.

It's absolutely fantastic, though! Dan's other work is stuff to be looked at as well, it's also very good.

 

This is a famicom game

This and a few other famicom games are able to make use of extra sound channels contained within the cartridge. Western NES systems dropped the extra cartridge pins which allowed this, so the reason why it doesn't sound "NES-like" is because technically it's not possible on the NES - it's only possible on a Famicom (unless you mod the console).

You can hear the differences in games like Castlevania III



Personally, as great as I think this set of remixes is, I think using something like the VRC6 is cheating :v: