♫RED ALARM (Stage 1 BGM, Virtual Boy) NES Arrangement - NintendoComplete
48This is my arrangement of the first stage theme from Nintendo and T&E Soft's 1995 Nintendo Virtual Boy game, Red Alarm. I have arranged it for native playback on NES hardware.
It was super disorienting and difficult to tell walls from passageways, but I always really enjoyed Red Alarm. I also really enjoyed it's fairly harsh and loud music, so here we go! The NES's sound is nowhere near as advanced as the VB's, so this rendition of it is lacking those killer saws. I know I could've used the VRC6 for the sawtooth instruments, but I much prefer writing for the base hardware. I did everything possible to preserve the sweet white noise percussion, though.
The drums aren't actually being generated by the NES. I sampled them from the original VB game since I wasn't able to get enough power and volume out of the NES's noise generator. But, since they sounded completely horrendous using DPCM compression, I went with PCM samples to avoid nasty artifacting in the sound. Those samples are tiny (4K in total), but wow, what a difference they make! I was pretty happy overall with how close I think I came to the original son with this mix, hardware differences aside.
I hope you enjoy the arrangement!
If you'd like to see my playthrough of the game, you can find it here: https://youtu.be/SO8jCls8F24
And if you like the music, be sure check out the playlist of other music I've done: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3gSj_kh1fHueSujqQR8xQQ84DWIjrU4F
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