"Bad Apple!!" but entirely in SimTunes (see description)
192Note: Tempo is pretty iffy in SimTunes. This is too slow, but the next speed setting is too fast (and incredibly glitchy in the VM). Playing the video at 1.25x sounds better and closer to the original 138 BPM (which would be 1.15x), so I recommend giving it a shot!
So, I recently reverse-engineered SimTunes, an obscure 1996 children's game by Maxis (from SimCity fame), just for the fun of it, managing to extract and interpret nearly all assets and data files (save for some weird irrelevant metadata). This sort of "digital archaeology" is a hobby of mine.
In the game, you place these super-cute musical insects (Bugz) around a 160x104 board, along with colored blocks denoting musical notes/riffs and control blocks changing their motion. As they walk around and pass over blocks, music is played, and with the extra unused space you can draw something else. It's a fun concept, if a little too limited. Nevertheless, I've always been fond of this game.
I always wanted to get a deeper look at the game, extract some assets and just fool around with it. I even managed to write a script to export the resulting music as MIDIs! Fun. But this new deeper knowledge about the game is a bit pointless. By all accounts it's a game forgotten by history, which very few people engaged with in earnest, even at the time it was released, let alone now!
I was wondering, then, if I could put this hobby project to some good use, and maybe bring some attention/love to this cute little forgotten game. What better way to do it than a rendition of "Bad Apple!!"? As it turns out, nobody seems to have done this yet on YouTube. So let's fix that, and do it right!
"Bad Apple!!" is a music piece originally from the 1998 bullet-hell game "Lotus Land Story", the 4th entry in the very popular "Touhou Project" series by Jun'ya "ZUN" Ōta. It's been remixed by Alstroemeria Records with the new lyrics sung by Nomico, then made into a famous music video ( • 【東方】Bad Apple!! ＰＶ【影絵】 ) by Anira following storyboards by Mu, which has become a modern challenge for people messing around with some software/hardware. See also:
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Apple!!#Use_as_a_graphical_and_audio_test
This explanation by (Part 1) • Bad Apple Explained: History and Anal... (Part 2) • Bad Apple Explained Part 2: The Demos...
So I wrote a script that converts a MIDI file of "Bad Apple!!" (which I had to simplify by hand) and a few iconic hand-picked video frames from the music video, then automatically assembles a SimTunes custom tune file I can load up and play. Sadly, I could only run SimTunes poorly, using a Windows XP virtual machine (DOSBox timing was even more uneven), so apologies for the clicks and stuttering. (It also made it difficult to "synchronize" the parts of the music with the images, so they don't always match well.)
Here's the TUN file download if anyone wants to try it out: https://1ucasvb.com/stuff/BadApple.tun
EDIT: I quickly put together some code which assembles the audio by hand by simulating the game, allowing me to get a perfect reconstruction at any tempo. So now we have the proper SimTunes cover of "Bad Apple!!" - This is what it sounds like: https://soundcloud.com/lucasvb/bad-apple-but-with-simtunes-reconstruction-at-proper-tempo
Enjoy!
Full disclosure: I have never played any Touhou game and I have no idea how a bunch of anime girls fit into the lore of a bullethell game series. But the song and video are cool, the demoscene around it is fun, and just the perfect way to set up a homage to SimTunes. :)