A little confused about After Burner II's music

Interesting

http://segaretro.org/File:AB20AB_Music_JP_Box1.jpg

Apparently there were in fact two separate releases of After Burner II (perhaps?). The second is known as "with melody version"... according to the official 20th anniversary soundtrack (and trust me that has plenty of versions to compare things to)

After Burner
After Burner II
After Burner II (with melody)

it affects "Final Take Off" too (this vs. this)... and supposedly "Maximum Power" but the differences there must be pretty small

I believe there's no dumps of the "melody" version... if it even exists.

 

As an aside, there's also an additional melody line in Final Take Off in the versions with the melody in this song. It follows the SST Band arrangements of the song in that case as well. There's a similar inconsistency in arrangement between the various versions of Burning Point (Thunder Blade's boss music), with basically everything aside from the original arade having a different, longer intro (of course most other versions also use it as level BGM, and not just the boss music, like Super Thunder Blade).

I've long wanted to have someone put in those melodies in the 32X After Burner, since to my knowledge nothing's happening on those PSG channels otherwise.

 

Maximum Power is very different. In fact, go listen to the Hang-On attract music, then After Burner's Maximum Power, then After Burner II's.

But yes as far as we know these melody versions were first released on the OST before finding their way onto the home ports... IIRC the US C64 version has it and I know the PC Engine port has it so I guess devs picked and chose.

IIRC After Burner the song doesn't get a lot of airplay in the game itself due to the way the music playback was changed between After Burner and After Burner II and that the songs are now no longer distributed evenly between the levels; Final Take-Off, however, does get quite a bit of play.

 

The mystery of the melody versions of the After Burner soundtrack still elude me, too.

It's a well known fact that the songs were rearranged in After Burner II from the original After Burner, but there has never been a known dump of the arcade version with the melody versions intact, despite countless ports playing the melody, and the recording of the arcade version with the melody (from that second video) that can be found in the Saturn port of the game.

Loading the arcade ROMs of ABII in the Hoot music player does show an interesting thing though: The two songs with an additional melody, After Burner and Final Take Off, both have one sound channel unused - which leads me to believe AM2 removed the melodies before final production for unknown reasons.

Interestingly, there's an unused arcade version of the complete arrangement of Burning Point, too:

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IAQpiqc46o[/video]

 

Odd, I've always thought that melody was just part of the SST Band arrangement, which they decided to include in Bayonetta because it sounded cool. Mind blown. =|

Now that's interesting. The plot thickens...

 

Additional note: On the Sega Ages version of After Burner on the Saturn, the melody versions of the songs are marked as "Rev.A" in the soundtrack, whilst the versions heard in the final arcade version of After Burner II are marked "Rev.B/Arcade". It also has the arrangements from the original After Burner marked as "AB1"

(To unlock them, I think you have to press the right button 3 times on the options screen, that gives you a second menu with an option called "BGM mode". It's all CDDA though so can obviously be played by other means, too)

 

Holy shit, just yesterday I had the random urge to look this theme up and get confused by this exact thing. What mentski says is interesting, though... Perhaps there was some sort of (perceived) rights problem with the melody that didn't get cleared up until a little later? Or the composer just completely dropped the ball and forgot to tell anyone they were still going to add melodies to some of the songs. :v:

 

Since Hiro is a Sega employee I think it's the latter... unless there was a special edition we don't know about.

 

Late reply but, for posterity's sake, CASE SOLVED.

 

Dunno if this has been mentioned, but just for the sake of it:

Spoiler

The After Burner theme was reused and made into an epic level theme in Shinobi 3DS. (You know, the one where you're fighting on top of the plane.)

https://dl.dropbox.com/s/ijol2yzep9qu7a1/Shinobi_3D_-_After_Burner.mp3

I actually heard this version first and was shocked when I heard the Genesis theme.

Also, I believe "Red Out" was reused for the boss in said level.

https://dl.dropbox.com/s/rwl9bfi8ku71a2v/Shinobi_3D_-_Red_Out_-Shinobi_Style-.mp3

Yeah, I was a Shinobi fanatic at one point. =V

 

...Maybe you should try the good Shinobi games. =P

 

As a matter of fact, I have played that game too - I was also crazy about it! So fun to play on my PSP! (Heck, I timed myself and beat the game in one hour and seven minutes, *WITHOUT* using savestates.) That was a little later on, though.

...I'd bring up the PS2 game, but that would be going too off-topic. Anyway, back to whatever discussion about After Burner's music was going on, I just wanted to bring up something interesting.

 

And I think Sega Game Music Vol. 3 After Burner is the album in question.

 

Actually, although those tracks might have been on that CD, they're specifically referring to re-recording the melody tracks for this boxset:
After Burner 20th Anniversary Box

I find is impressive that they took the original sound data that was until now only playable on a dev kit, and essentially made a sound ROM from is that *should* work on actual arcade hardware.

I wonder if it'd be possible to rip the ROM from the game files and make a custom MAME set?

 

As soon as it's dumped and if the ROMs aren't encrypted or patched on the fly (as happens with the spindash in Sonic 1?), it should be possible.

 

MAME ROM file (for those in need):
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25073603/vgm/epr-11112.17

VGM Pack with Melody Versions
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25073603/vgm/After%20Burner%20II.7z

Courtesy of CTR and ValleyBell from VGMRips, including 3DS Decryption Methods for making this possible.

 

(backing up my previous post)

Notice the ending in the melody version of Final Take Off. This is not present in the release non-melody versions of After Burner I and II. Strange.

Also, suprisingly, the devs for the Amiga (not Activision)/PC Engine ports of AFBII had a chance to port the songs from the melody versions. Check it out.

 

The version with the melody is the one I've always known, even before I knew it was related to After Burner. I first heard it in a promotional Sega VHS tape from 1994:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_90F4Q4pEY#t=7m53s
(7m53s)

So you can imagine my confusion the first time I played After Burner II.

Incidentally, that footage has a lot of Sega music, a lot of which I'm familiar with, and a lot of which still eludes me to this day. What tracks do you guys reckon are in there? I'm asking because I first heard the Sonic CD songs in this tape, and I was really surprised when I finally played the game many years later. I particularly like the track that plays at 4m19s, and I'd love to know which game that is from.

(I watched this tape way too many times when I was a kid. I still have it, actually.)