Game:

Mappy (1983)

Duration: 2:23

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41

Mappy already had a Famicom/NES port, but its music was a lot more basic because it was made in the nacent days of that platform where developers generally tended to think that sound effects cutting off was undesirable, or otherwise lacked the knowledge/capability to sort priority for sound effects vs. music. For the unaware, the NES stock chip (2A03) has 5 channels of audio, 4 of which would have seen heavy use in those days. The developers of that port of Mappy opted to reserve 2 of them for sound effects so that they would never cut into the music. The result of this is that the harmony/countermelody stuff is just totally absent from the arcade.

Now that's not to say they did a bad job and mine is so much better--I didn't have to fight with strict memory budgets and game logic and graphics or deadlines when constructing my covers nor likely have to build everything in assembly.

But I did feel that there was something to be gained by "re-covering" it basically. I figured I'd try my hand at adding in some percussion while I was at it, and leveraging that addition to undo the swing beat for a few measures where I felt it fitting. I hope any Mappy purists aren't upset by this.

If you want a nice FLAC file with an additional ending:
https://soundcloud.com/user-787752991/mappy-stage-themes-2a03-cover-0cc-famitracker

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