♫Theme from BAD CAT, NES & SNES Arrangement - NintendoComplete
160This video shows two versions of the title theme from Rainbow Arts' 1988 Dos PC game Bad Cat (also known as Street Cat). The first is a recreation of the original track playing on an NES. The second, starting at 3:18, is an arrangement I created of the song for the SNES. The audio for both was recorded from the original consoles using flashcarts.
What is there really to say about Bad Cat? The game was absolutely terrible, but it was worth owning just for the music! It didn't support any external sound cards (not that many existed yet in 1988), but it did pull off some amazing voodoo in how it pumped full digital audio through the internal PC beeper by blasting the CPU with a raw PCM stream - a technique similar to what I used for the NES version!
Behold the power of the Intel 8088 with 256K of RAM! So old school!
The NES version of the track was intended to faithfully reproduce the sound of the PC game. I did manage to filter out a lot of the nasty hissing and distortion from the original recording, but the NES ended up introducing back in almost as much noise as I'd eliminated. Oh well. The video clip for that one was taken from the CGA version.
The SNES version of the track was fun to make. I aimed for an Italian Disco sound with the synths. The rough quality of the original recording made it difficult to track out some of the parts (or to even tell what the original synths were), so there's a bit of creative interpretation going on with this version. The video clip for it was taken from the EGA version.
Thanks for listening! Hope you enjoy it!
Because it was requested, here is a link to the files that I recorded this from: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wREG9Ux-WnNtQ3fGlol7llznOrbfJgPl/view?usp=sharing
The zip file contains two different versions of the theme for the SNES in .spc format as well as the NES version in .nsf format. They can be played on chiptune players, emulators, and original hardware.
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