Game:

Mother 3 (2006)

Duration: 1:29

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51

An oscilloscope visualization of the Game Boy Advance game Mother 3 song "Memory of Life".

Normally, the game software itself mixes the multiple audio channels and outputs it to the Game Boy Advance's PCM channel already mixed, so without tinkering with the software, it is impossible to separate the internal audio channels since the mixing is not done by the hardware.

However, the Game Boy Advance BIOS actually has helper tools for decoding MIDI messages and while I haven't researched deeply into this, it is very possible that some games make use of MIDI to store audio data. Due to this, it is possible that Mother 3 actually uses MIDI to store music data, and it decodes MIDI using the Game Boy Advance BIOS. If we intercept the calls to BIOS, it might be possible to retrieve and store the MIDI messages to an external file. The only thing left is to extract the samples used in the music, and we can reconstruct the audio using a MIDI and a soundfont.

That is just a speculation, but that might be how the MIDI files from https://mother4ever.net/music-mother-3/ were created, which was used to create this oscilloscope visualization. Please note that MIDI uses "channels" mostly to group instruments, and is not guaranteed (and is not required) to be playing one sample at most at any given time, compared to traditional tracker software. That's why one channel can play as many notes at the same time as it wants, most often for playing chords. The actual number of samples playing at one point may reach up to 20 or so. In a traditional tracker channel, we would need somewhere around that.

Since this has been played from extracted MIDI and sample files, we get rid of the internal channel mixing of the game and the 8-bit sample limitation of the Game Boy Advance. We also get sinc resampling. This all contributes to a very clean sound that is almost free from noise. I have not confirmed this myself, but internally, the samples are stored in 16-bit format, but they are converted to 8-bit samples before mixing, and then the result is then truncated to 8-bit again before being pushed to the audio buffer of the Game Boy Advance. No wonder it sounds really noisy.

The instrument names shown are just my guesses, and may not be accurate.

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