Michael Jackson - Smooth Criminal (NES Cover on Real Hardware) - NintendoComplete
139Hi everyone! This is quite different from my usual uploads, to be sure. I got the day off of work today because of the weather, so I figured I'd try something different.
This is a cover of Michael Jackson's song Smooth Criminal, based on the version used in the Sega Genesis game, Michael Jackson's Moonwalker.
It's one of my all-time favorite songs, and the Genesis version of it sounded awesome. I wanted to see if I could get it close on much more limited hardware.
There were no soundfonts or VSTs involved here. I tracked everything by hand in Famitracker, exported the song as an NSF file, put it on my Powerpak NES flash cart, and recorded the playback. It's playing using the system's base 2A03 sound hardware - no VRC6 voodoo here. So, I was pretty limited by the five available channels: there are 2 channels for square waves, 1 for a triangle wave, 1 for the white noise generator, and the last is for digital playback of 1-bit delta-encoded PCM.
The samples were taken from two sources: The bass line is using samples from the game Journey to Silius (I really wanted to try my hand at Sunsoft's method for filling out the bottom-end of the sound!), and the voice samples were all recorded from the Genesis Moonwalker game, trimmed, and recompressed for playback on the NES. There is definitely more distortion here in their playback than the Genesis had, but hey, it's an NES - did you expect otherwise? I think they still sound pretty clear. There is a little bit of slowdown in the audio recording - I'm guessing that the NES was struggling to keep up with the amount of samples used because of the quality I had them being pushed through the CPU at. That, or my inexperience with Famitracker is showing :) I was shocked at how much bass I could push without causing any popping or overdriving the signal!
The video itself is made up of heavily processed clips from the Master System and Genesis Moonwalker games. I wasn't interested in hacking a game to make this, so I took the 16-bit graphics and beat them like a red-headed stepchild with posterization techniques to make them better resemble something you might have seen on NES hardware. The graphics aren't totally within NES spec (a few too many colors, and the NES's 2k of RAM and 1.7mhz processor would've been hurting!), but I was only going for entertaining visuals to go with the music, so oh well.
I'd love to hear any feedback you guys might have. I had a blast doing this and I was fairly pleased with the result, but any constructive thoughts are certainly welcome. Thanks for watching!
___
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!
Visit for the latest updates!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/NintendoComplete/540091756006560
https://twitter.com/nes_complete