♫AFRICA (Toto) NES Cover - NintendoComplete
158It's been awhile since I last worked with FamiTracker, so I decided to give a shot at covering one of my favorite songs, Africa by Toto.
This was written to be played back using the Konami VRC-6 mapper, most famously used in the Japanese version of Castlevania 3. It provides a couple extra channels and waveforms to work with. I originally intended to do this for a base NES, but I couldn't have smashed this song into 4 channels without gutting the harmonies, and I wasn't willing to do that. They're the best part of the song!
So I ended up coming up with a unique compromise to do better than that. The available channels with the VRC6 still aren't quite enough for this song - especially the chorus's vocals - so the chorus is using digitized samples of the song's original vocal track. Doing this, I got all of the distinct harmony lines into one channel, allowing me to use all of the synthesis channels for just the instrumentation. The quality of the 1-bit DPCM samples is surprisingly clear! I also purposely forced the sawtooth channel to clip to eek out a pseudo-extra channel to add more heft to the otherwise fairly weak noise channel-only percussion. Hehe.
It was fairly difficult to pull off, especially with having to align the music with the digital clips, but I was reasonably happy with how it came out. I'll definitely say that writing it gave my ear a workout - it can be very difficult to pull out individual melody and harmony lines in a song that layers them as Africa does.
Oh yeah, and this also runs fine on a real NES using a flashcart. I tried it on a PowerPak, and everything including the VRC6 channels played perfectly. I always found the ability to do that on a real NES pretty neat.
By all means, please let me know what you think!
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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