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Arcade Remixes And The Six Million Dollar Cabinet
Anonymous Coward writes "Some guy has mucked about with the background music of old arcade games. Also, this site proves that some arcade games are built to last." Hey, I know that arcade games are built to last; I'm a VAPS member! :)
better than a load of the stuff on mp3.com :-)
This is what .NSF files are for; the only problem is that you need to be an expert at 6502 assembly, since NSF files are chunks of code ripped from the ROM with a few subroutines highlighted. The nice thing is that if you have a good NSF player, it sounds just like the real thing AND you can play a given song as long as you want without sound effects.
--
Your friendly neighborhood mIRC scripter.
if (ismoderator(reader)) hidemessage(this);
* Q
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.
I didn't think anyone could echo my sentiment any more perfectly... There was such a spirit of discovery in early synth music that I can't get over -- the sort of spirit of ingenuity that only comes around when there is some newly emerging field.
-- nath
It looked like cinderblocks to me. Foam rubber would be completely ineffective at breaking the fall. Cinderblocks work alot better.
1 0"
I wanna see them drop the unit into a swimming pool and then see how well it works (esp with the extension cord shorting into the water).
"3.14159265358979323846264279502884197169399375
-- nath
Denver International Airport has already widely embraced this style of music. On the train that runs between the terminal and the concourses, whenever you reach a stop it plays this little burst of music that I *swear* has to be a cut from some original Nintendo game. There's also an accompanying voice-over that says "Welcome to Concourse __" that would strongly benefit from a James Earl Jones-esque "This... is Concourse __" a'la CNN. Think about it - how did those pirates fit 16 men on a dead man's chest?
Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, will be quoted out of context on
Power Pill does a Pac-Man Remix that is actually fun to listen to...i got mine from mp3spy, dont know where to find it these days...
"They think its sexist"
"They think its sexist"
"Well, whats wrong with being sexy?"
I met the guy who dropped the arcade machine off of a 2 story building at Comdex in Chicago this last year. They had the machine there and they were looping the video of it over and over. They are touting their arcade PC's that CAN be dropped and still run. The machine was still running afterwards. Pretty cool stuff. The box looks like it'd make it out of nuclear holocaust.
------------------------------------------
the amazing bc
latin/funk flugelhorn & trumpet
webnaut, music junkie, sysadmin from hell
the amazing bc
just another guy doing IT
webnaut, music junkie, holes-in-head
Hope that wasn't a vintage cab, or I'm gonna have to go down to r-cade and...
OK, I've had time to check out everything on that site. End result: you get some nostalgia, and a lot of iffy music.
Basically it's a lot of videogame related tunes that fall into all sorts of traps.
You basically find:
That being said, there are some songs that are pretty decent, some novel ideas, and some that if nothing else make me think of making a longer version.
Now I know I left out an awful lot. There are tunes that are close, but no cigar. These were just the few that had that special something to them (to me anyway). You might also note that none of these tunes are by DJ Pretzel.. sorry man, but your sound is not quite there. The Mario Jazz thing is close, and pretty unique, but I prefer my jazz on the real thing, not sequenced...
Well.. hope someone puts these opinions to good use anyway...
Tho, Chris has his own mp3.com site with a HUGE ASS 6.4MB MP3 of the T2 title song, which r0x.
I eat the flesh off the living, and I vote!
The best part was when someone was blocking the doors, and the voice would say "Please move away from the doors, you are delaying the departure of this train." For some reason people would alwyas feel like they'd just been singled out, and everyone would inch in closer to the middle of the train. Hilarious ;)
I work at Arcade Technologies and it was cinderblock that the Arcade machine fell on. Also, it was the corner that hit, which ended up throwing the PC down towards the ground itself. Trust me, there was plenty of shock. None of us here actually expected the thing to really work, but it did, and scandisk didn't even find any errors. Branin
Now all we have to do is wait ten years for someone to remix Sega's excellent Jet Set Radio soundtrack. Although, there's at least one song in the game that I'm sure won't make it to the US.. (:
Emerald Coast from Sonic Adventure wouldn't make a bad remix either.
I'm pretty sure if you dropped your Optiplex, while running, off your desk onto the ground, it would stop working. Nothing is doctered, and there was tremendous amounts of shock on the PC. I have a video I could send you if you wanted (although it's quite large). Branin
The ArcadePC is indeed for use as a coin-op in an arcade, with specially written software and a few ports. For instance, there is a Quake 1 arcade game that has been modified a little bit to support quarters and trackballs better that is running off of a PC. A (relatively) new game that uses ArcadePC's is HydroThunder by Midway. There are literlly thousands upon thousands of these machines out there. It's purpose is for Arcade Game Developers to have a known, good (state of the art componenents) platform to publish games on. Branin
It's actually a state of the art PC (running Windows in the machine that was dropped) that was dropped. A desktop PC probably wouldn't survive a 3 foot drop, while running (which the machine that was dropped was). Branin
Actually, it was an industrialized version of Windows 98, that had had many modifications made to it in order to be reliable and rugged. Branin
I have the game, and just love the music. It has that nice tribal/ambient quality to it. Unfortunately the game was released in '93, and in game music is all FM-Synthesized. Virgin released a soundtrack CD to the game, with all the songs professionally recorded, but it went out of production in '94, and is now almost impossible to find. (It's sought after by many dune afficianados, and I would love to get my hands on it, or at least some MP3 tracks. Email me if you can give me any info on it.)
So imagine my surprise when I find one of the songs from the game, remixed with top-notch quality and very true to the original.
Oh, happy day! :)
levik@levik.com
Ñ'
I just got a Nintendo again from e-bay, and I've been playing Metroid, but I also have Megaman & Megaman 2, Ninja Gaiden III, and a few other games. So I must say...
:)
:) And even then... maybe it still wouldn't be the same. :)
.WAV files, though; I think I can live with a little .mp3 distortion.
.WAV file, use .WAV file instead. ;)
:|
It's so much better playing the games on the real system!
After I didn't have my Nintendo anymore, I used to try to delude myself into thinking that emulators were just as good, and I must say, back when I was running DOS, Nesticle was pretty good. I dumped the intro music from Zelda with it, and I was hard-pressed to tell the difference. (not that I had a real copy of Zelda nearby...)
But I don't think it would really be the same unless I had a working TV-out on my monitor, two Nintendo controllers wired up, (hey, at least there's driver support for it...) and a perfect NES emulator... (they're getting better, but I'd want close to SNES9X's quality--for the Nintendo, of course!
However, since sound emulation is one of the areas most lacking on the NES emus I've seen for Linux, I'm going to sample what I can both from a real Nintendo and from some emulators wherever possible. I don't think I'll store them as raw
(audio zealots--encode them by a factor of 2 more until no one can tell the difference; if bigger than
...now I need to check out that site. I've heard a techno remix of Flashman's music that was ok, but my favorite was Quickman's stage. Also, I've said it before, but the music for Simon's Quest rocked!
Man, now I need to get all my Nintendo games all over again; Simon's Quest, Final Fantasy, Zelda... All gone!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
These are pretty neat; anyone remember all the great music on the Genesis? I'll always remember the music for Thunder Force II and Herzog Zwei, which at the time was the closest thing to a RTS, and a freaking awesome 2 player game!!!
http://www.minibosses.com/
These guys kick major booty. Check out such greats as Contra, Castlevania, Metroid, and more! All up in Mp3 for your listening pleasure.
I saw this over at ArsTechnica a while ago. Once again, they kick ass. And they even play shows..!
ftp://cavan.jesus.cam.ac.uk/pub/tbg m/Xenon2.MP3
When I was younger I saw the original pong for sale for $300 Canadian. I had the money to by it at the time, but thought "what the fuck do I want PONG for???" I wish I had bought it now... That was in the late 80's.
I now have the opportunity to buy an Atari game that I loved in the 80's (I won't name it, lest someone else find it and beat me to it, but it was not that popular anyhow...) I am not going to miss this chance again.
Amazingly this system is in ok shape, and only $600 Canadian. I say "only" because I spent more in quarters on the damn thing when it was in my local arcade.
I don't know if I like the trend of throwing arcade machines off of buildings as funny as it may seem... I just found out about an AS 400 that was thrown away at work. (There is a second one about to be turfed, but I managed to get dibs on it...)
What will eventually happen to these machines is what happend to pong. In the late 80's I thought pong sucked (I still do), but its a collectors item now. A very rare game indeed. So, I will preserve the atari coin-op and the AS 400. Maybe they will go up in value? Maybe not... Still, I will enjoy hanging on to them, and keeping them on the ground floor.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
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asdf
2 1337 4 u!
My favorite has always been "Valkyrie needs food" in a high pitch tone just like the first game.
-Linux is SO fast it does an infinite loop in 5 seconds.
or does the guy throwing the game off the roof look a lot like Castro?!
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
Zophar's has a whole slew of original NES .nsf files that contain the original songs and nosefart does a fine job of playing them. Try playing the original and then the remix to compare. Really neat stuff.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
You're not alone. It always depresses me when I actually have to EXPLAIN what I meant when I mutter Gauntlet phrases.
--
www.worldforge.org
Looks like the classic Nintendo games never die...they just get resampled ^_^
I'm actually glad to see someone taking an interest in breathing some life back into some of my favorite game tunes--especially since most of the remixes I find are merely MIDI's, and not nearly as exciting to listen to if you don't have a decent sound card for MIDI voices (like my AWE64 gold or a Live128).
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Most NES freeware developers on the Internet use LoopyNES, available at Zophar.net. It's for DOS, but it'll probably run in DOSEmu. It offers nearly perfect emulation of the NES CPU and PPU (helluva lot better than Testicle) with only two problems I've found: 1. no wave logging, and 2. a bug in the sample playback code (yes, the NES had a compressed sample channel) that sometimes loops or drops samples. (NESten is the best Windows-based emu currently.)
<O
( \
Will I retire or break 10K?
On Napster, you can find Tetris remixes up the proverbial ass.
<O
( \
Will I retire or break 10K?
Just use some of the old tracking software like Fastracker or Modtracker or Protracker. It'll take some getting used to if you want to create that type of music - ahh the old Amiga days. I wonder what's been going on with that company recently? And just rip the sounds off any cd etc.
See, Windows 98 is not as bad as you lino-heads try to FUD us Windows users about. Why else would this company choose Win98 for a rugged impact survivable arcade machine?
But as is obvious from what I have said, sorry, but I can't make it gospel for you!
~ ~~~
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whoops...i think i knew that at one point but have since forgotten...good call.
"They think its sexist"
"They think its sexist"
"Well, whats wrong with being sexy?"
Don't bother looking for those songs on Napster; I've already replaced them with cuckoo sounds...
-- Floyd
i think this is a bad idea and it makes me sad. we should leave the old tunes as they were! nuff said!!! :(
............ no.
even a retard like you should know it all depends on the BOX it's in!
............ no.
Has anyone checked Linux's reliablity when being dropped down two stories? I'm especially looking for comparisons to BSD.
I've heard that OpenBSD won't even let you throw it off a building.
I've been wondering for YEARS when someone was going to get around to sampling Mega Man.. that stuff is just BEGGING to be integrated into some new techno.. -_- Most of that early nintendo/super nintendo stuff is just without compare in newer games [Zelda 64 was just sad.. especially the music in the big field in the center.], and it's amazing how little of it has been mined by the DJ/techno community.. seemed like nintendo games was the one thing as of yet untouched.
:) THAT was a good song. And if i do ever actually get around to learning any musical instruments, i want to try to make a version of it with slap bass done on an actual guitar.. -_-)
of course now the downside is, whenever i get around to learning how to make music, i can't sample MegaMan and be totally original. Ah well.. whatever.
I have some deeper, very relevant comment on the tip of my mind that i can't quite summon into being because it is 1:16 AM. Too bad. Goodnight.
(P.S. If anyone knows where i can get hold, legally or otherwise, of a recording of the song from the video game "Earthbound" that they played when you were fighting the atomic spherical robot things on the way to the final battle, could you let me know where i could get it?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I'll start hearing the Dragon Warrior music, and it won't go away. (or Mega Man, or Final Fantasy, or any of a couple dozen video games that I can pick out from the outlines of the main character sprites burned into my retina)
I love those old songs, but I never want to hear anything like them again!
It only takes a mention of one of those old games to get me humming its theme music for a week, if I hear new ones I'll eventually have a complete set of rotating video game music in my head. That would be a fate worse than death, worse even than getting a Muzak ear implant.
And I thought that I was the only one who does that...
I do it routinely up at school and nobody realizes what I'm saying.
Sigh... still looking to buy an old Gauntlet arcade machine...
Wizard shot the potion...
Elf needs food badly...
"Wizard needs food badly"
If this can help the new generations better appreciate my 80s-centric humour, I'm for it.
2 1337 4 u!
The tune was Megablast by Bomb the Bass and it was this tune that was remixed for the game and not the other way around.
Anyone who has played mortal combat, Street Fighter, Double Dragon, or Super Mario Brothers, should know that they've made movies themed to these games and the soundtracks are all remixed. Also does anyone remember how mortal combat became one of the largest dance songs around?
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
My other first post is car post.
"wierd noises that you just don't _find_ unless you're programming a bad sound api or echoing patterns of numbers to /dev/audio ..."
/dev/dsp ;)
MAN OH MAN, thanks for the suggestion. Try
$ cat core >
... bonus points if you can debug your apps by listening to them.
** what?? monkeys?? This means war!!
NESticle allowed you to capture the speaker output as a .wav file. However you'd get the sound effects in the recording as well.
** what?? monkeys?? This means war!!
Xenon 2 was surely a classic Amiga game? I mean OK it got ported from Amiga to the PC, but in those days you might or might not have a sound card, like a year or so ago you might or might not have 3D graphics hardware. The Amiga was a (relatively) static platform, so the developers got the most out of it, and knew that everyone would get to hear the music.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
core is interesting, but the COOLEST is
/dev/hda1 > /dev/audio
:)
/* this will result in some wierd rollover problems, which are left intentionally unfixed. to fix them, change to an int and typedef to unsigned char when you cout */
:)
:)
cat
seriously, sometime i'm going to tape about half an hour of my LinuxPPC partition, drive it down to the local college radio station, and ask them to play it during the ambient music show..
/dev/hda1 (or your corresponding equivilent) is great, though, especially if you come across any _sound files_ on your drive saved in a lossless format-- they just play at random and then disappear back into the soup.
and, for the record, you _can_ make some pretty interesting stuff just by writing very simple programs.
unsigned char n=0;
char i = 1
for(;;) {
cout << (n+=i);
if (n>=255) i=-(i+1);
if (n=0) i=-(i-1);
if (i==0) i++;
}
I don't have physical access to a linux box with sound right now and i haven't compiled the program above [it was just the first example i could think of off the top of my head], so i don't know what it sounds like, but messing with that kind of pattern can give you some really trippy shit.
Or find some large databaselike data files with a lot of repetitive structure but varying information interspersed, and you get something that vaguely approaches the quality level of Coil..
Can ANY non-unixlike operating systems claim that they come with a built-in industrial music generator?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Thad
Thad
I'm a collector of video game music. I have music of everything from the original Zelda game music to the newest Parasite Eve and Chrono Cross soundtracks.
:) or even Chrono Trigger ($30 for 2 discs). Also, look to Soundtrack Central for reviews and track listings.
There is some great stuff, and you can get hooked on the music for days. I strongly suggest that anynoe who's interested in finding out more about video game soundtracks purchase the Chrono Cross Soundtrack ($35 for 3 discs and a poster of the chick in the game - sweet
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
I know, that probably most people won't care, but Freaky Flow did a drum'n'bass track with PJ(called "Mist"). It's uses a breakbeat with the music from the water levels in Donkey Kong Country. trypn0tik
How true is this? (You can never be sure with the Aphex...) I love the track to pieces, but I've always assumed he ripped the game sounds from MAME. Confirmation of this story would be lovely...
EROS will bounce back onto the desk you originally lifted it from!
the files are ok but,
:-)
most of them are dredfully similar to their originals, using very limited sound ranges and polyphony; perhaps this was the authors intent.
However, as a musician, I would certainly like to throw some new instrumentation at these charts, and use the new freedom of polyphony thoroughly!
Also, the midi colors seem quite prevelent; lets hear some real live players milking this stuff up!
I'm tempted to go arrange some of that MegaMan3 stuff... loved the game when I was kid
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
SPC files record the actual sound data used by the SNES, and the sound-coprocessor must be emulated to play these files. If it's emulated correctly, the music will sound exactly the same as on the SNES (unlike the MIDI versions of some songs that are available). I know there's a decoder plug-in available for WinAMP (possibly from the same place as ZSNES), but does anyone know if it's possible to play (or create) these under Linux? I have a bunch of Chrono Trigger songs that this site just reminded me of :)
Dang! wwhats wrong with you people! This site is not yet Slashdotted! I managed to get my download at a good 4.5K\sec...
Not only that, but there is not Natalie Portman references, even in the Trolls! What is wrong with you people?
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
You gotta get the 5th letter of the third word from clicking on the first banner, and the 9th letter of the last word from the second banner before you can log in.
And then you find out that all they have is quake3 and Norton Antivirus.
I especially enjoyed the Star fox instrumental remix. It really brought the feel of the game back without that god-awful chittering that those computer made "friends" made.
The name of the product, and all the sales material on the site suggest that the ArcadePC is for use as a coin-op in an arcade. Does anyone know what you can (legally) run on these and charge money for? OK I see that you could write your own software and run that, but are there some software houses out there producing new arcade games for the coin-op market, that run on a PC? Do any of the arcade game producers commercially license any of their ROMs for use in emulators for use in a real pay-for arcade unit (rather than home use, as I believe Capcom do)?
OK you could put mame and some downloaded ROMs on it, but that could get you in trouble. Or is that what they are really suggesting it is for?
I wonder how my PC will survive being dropped from the third floor. I mean their unit was just a simple arcade machine, a desktop PC should survive three stories shouldn't it?
If you don't hear from me in a couple days you can assume the worst....I must bodly go where no computer has gone before!
Farewell,
Brave computer dropper
Check out "The Horrible Plans of Flex Busterman" by Patric C. Basically, it's the soundtrack to a mid-80's video game that never existed. You'll swear you've herd it on an Atari somewhere. Check out United Against Busterman
404 File Not Found The requested
Aphex Twin - Bouncing Becephaluas (sp?) Ball, has a sample or two from Defender in it.
Jungle music takes old videogame samples kinda frequently actually. The only things I can think of off the top of my head (aside from 3 bajillion ragga-jungle tunes) are D-Type by Capone (aka Dillinja, it's got some R-Type samples/inspiration), Frogger by Ryme Tyme. There's also some dubplate I've heard mixed by Usual Suspects that has a nice little videogame ditty that I can't place, combined with tight drums. Who'd ever you thought you could make a videogame tune so damn massive.
Chrono Trigger fans could also check out The Education by Vinyl Matt, but I can't remember if it was put out on Tokyo Dawn Records, Theralite, or Mo'Playaz.
Anyway, just thought I'd say that other people do this too. And it's DAMN fine listening most of the time ;)
I was wondering about this myself. Im pretty sure this Optiplex on my desk would survive a 2 story plunge if I slammed it into a cabinet, especially if it didnt hit concrete. However while first reading the page I didnt notice that, good observation. Much like that old dateline thing where they made the ford explode to prove that it was unsafe, but used pyrotechnics to make it look spectacular. Well this is sort of the reverse of that... Ah well.
That in the pictures of the arcade machine being dropped off the building, that they dropped it onto a series of what look to be packing pallettes? Also the cabinet looked like it hit top first. So I would imagine that these two combined factors would act in a similar mannar to collapsable body panels in a car. For those who don't follow : IT'S ABSORBING ALL THE IMPACT ENERGY (SHOCK). If they wanted to prove something, skip the housing and the pallettes. If it still survived, then I'd be impressed. Thoughts?
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I need a funny sig
Whoops, sorry, did i say most? Damn.
/dev/audio; create music with anything with even slightly higher-level abstractions and those sounds just don't come about. [not to say that everyone who attempted to create low level sound wound up creating something other than crap.] _This_ is why i would want to sample NES music; because it has a feel to it unlike the feel of anything else. What's the music in video games these days like? Just the same old thing that a synthesizer you can buy in a store does, sometimes just recorded music. Why sample that, why not just sample a non-game CD?
> I'm sorry, but the constat beep, beep, beep in Nintendo games is annoying as hell. Give me a modern game anyday.
Yes, of course 90% of everything is crap. The point of my post, which probably didn't get into the post because i'm only barely awake, is that early nintendo and most of SNES had this feel to it which is simply absent these days in video game music, and that some of it was simply amazing. Not all; some. And most of what makes it good, or at least unique, had to do with reasons directly related to the fact the composers were very limited by the format of the music.
> But you're probably one of those people who complains that super mario bros. had the best gameplay of all time. Sad.
Not really, but i am one of those people who can listen to [to give the most "well-known" example] aphex twin and not hear a single one of the notes because i'm listening to the sonic envelopes. Also perhaps sad.
I'm not being nostalgic for Super Mario Brothers 1, i'm being nostalgic for the Roland 303 and crappy vinyl records. 8-bit 11 khz sound can produce some truly amazing feels in the right hands, just because you are forced into applying a certain mode to everything, forced into giving everything a certain stylistic tone that makes it ideal for sampling.
Just because of the limitations of the format, the creators of that music were forced to take wierd sonic shortcuts, do strange things with pure waveforms, produce wierd noises that you just don't _find_ unless you're programming a bad sound api or echoing patterns of numbers to
The point of sampling something is because it brings some element to your music which you cannot produce on your own. Current videogame music is just _music_, normal music, and contains no elements that cannot be found elsewhere. Old-ass nintendo music _does_ have elements, feels, that cannot be found elseware, and thus it would make sense to sample them, to assimilate that feel..
I think my post took it as a given the listener had both listened carefully to nintendo music and had thought a lot about sampling. Those really are dumb assumptions. Sorry.
[why I love (and understand why most of you hate) minimal techno]
SLEEP NOW!!! NOW!!!!
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Half of me says this phenomenon is remixers getting desperate for new material - the other half says anything to keep the memories alive.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.