【初音ミク】ぽっぴっぽー Hatsune Miku Po Pi Po - PC engine Cover【Deflemask】
189Original song by Lamaze-P
PC engine cover made in Deflemask by moi
The thumbnail art is also mine, I hope you like it ^^
You can see it in its full glory here: http://fav.me/dbliypg
It's the 10th anniversary of the No. 1 princess in the world, Hatsune Miku!
This is a very important occasion which as a big fan I just couldn't let pass by, for the past 10 years she's been bringing joy to the world with her cutieful voice, iconic character design and a plethora of incredibly catchy songs by many very talented composers, as well as some pretty damn awesome rhythm games by Sega (I'm particularly fond of Project Mirai DX on the 3DS, that game is ADORABLE~ and save for a few sad omissions the musical selection is top-notch! But the best part is that it features my favourite Vocaloid, GUMI, as a guest-character ^^)
I had this cover done for a pretty long time now, but I hadn't posted it until now because I had bigger plans for it, I'd make a whole animation featuring a certain idol character who's relevant to the PC engine, as well as some of her many many friends (props to whoever knows who I'm talking about) dancing to this tune, but I just didn't have the time to actually get it done because real life happens...
But since Miku's birthday was fast approaching and I just needed to do something to commemorate it, I've decided that it was a good enough excuse to upload this to YouTube even if my original plans couldn't happen... Anyway, I hope you like it ^^
The game footage is from the PSP version of Hatsune Miku Project Diva 2nd btw...
-~-~-~-~-~-~-{ Now for the usual technical babble }-~-~-~-~-~-~-
This wasn't a particularly difficult song to cover, it was sure was fun to do, but the most interesting thing about it are the kick-drums! They sound pretty pumpy don't they? ;3
"What's so interesting about them?" you ask...
Well, it's the fact that they're playing at 8 times the usual speed!
"What do you mean by that?"
You know how PCE games (2D NTSC games in general) usually run at 60fps? Here's the thing, the system updates not only its image output 60 times every second, but also the sound output at that same speed, which works great as it is, but well, by 'overclocking' the system from 60hz to 480hz I can update the sound output 480 times every second, and by doing that I can change the pitch of an instrument 8 times faster than I could otherwise, and if I play an overdriven Triangle Wave at that speed, starting at a pretty high pitch, but quickly and sharply lowering its pitch I can achieve this pumping kick drum! Now ain't that a doozy? ;3
That's not all though, the kicks are playing on the same channel as the bass with no noticeable cut-off!
"Yeah, that's all fine and dandy, but I bet this means you wouldn't be able to play this in real hardware"
Not so fast! If I were to update the sound data for every instrument in every channel that fast, it would indeed take quite a toll on the CPU, but I don't have to do that! I'm only using the high clock speed on a single instrument, therefore I could simply update just that one instrument on a single channel, and the system would not only be able to handle it A-OK, but the extra CPU time required to execute that would be negligible! In fact, my good pal elmer from the PCEFX forum has helped me to do just that! You can find a ROM containing this song on the link below which you can play on your PCE emulator of choice or Turbo Everdrive:
https://sta.sh/0mn9n6gz4ue
It's not perfect, but the very minor issues it has are due to me having to change the wavetables on channel 1 from the kick one to the bass one on every beat, which causes a slight popping sound which is inherent to the system's soundchip (minus the HuC3280A revision), but it could be fixed if I just re-arranged the song to put the kicks on channel 6 instead of channel 1 but I don't have time to do that unfortunately...