♫THUNDER LANDING (Super Contra) NES Arrangement - NintendoComplete
171This is an arrangement of "Thunder Landing," the first stage BGM from Konami's 1988 arcade game Super Contra. I have arranged the song for native playback on NES hardware, and the audio was recorded directly from a toaster-model US NES deck.
When I was working on the SNES version of this track (https://youtu.be/lSNp4dYBwrc ), I got to thinking about what could be done to amp up the already excellent NES version of the track. I didn't want to use any hardware that expanded the audio capabilities of the base console (like the VRC6 or the MMC5), so I instead decided to muck about with the NES's ability to play raw PCM samples.
It can only play one sample at a time, so to get them all working together nicely, I'm using the slick SuperNSF driver to downmix three separate pseudo-channels of PCM into one. Two of them are playing the drums, guitars, and orchestra hits, and the last one is faking being a third pulse wave channel for proper chords. (I had to be really careful with that one. Notes tend to go really flat as you get further away from the sample's base note.) With three PCM sub-channels, the digital effects are being mixed at 12Khz. It's a *huge* jump in quality over what you get using DPCM samples.
It plays just fine on the real console, too. I put the .nsf on my PowerPak flash cart, plugged it in, and after about five seconds of loading it was good to go!
So this was just an experiment, but I thought the result was pretty neat. It wouldn't have ever been practical at all to do a track like this back in the NES's hey day (it wrecks the NES's CPU and memory was way too expensive - this one song alone is about 2/3 the size of the entire Super C cartridge!), but it is a fun way to get a glimpse at what the hardware could *technically* do. Pretty impressive for a piece of mass produced consumer hardware from 1983, I think. Since I made it, I figured I might as well share it. Thanks for listening!
If you'd like to check out any of my other arrangements, you can find the playlist at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3gSj_kh1fHueSujqQR8xQQ84DWIjrU4F
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