Game:

Ultima VI: The False Prophet (1990)

Duration: 5:06

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3

Truth be told, I never really would say I "played" this game. More like had a false start because I was young and inexperienced with RPGs or how to work DOS games at all.
The concept of reading the manual and figuring out the text parser, for example, was just something I wasn't prepared for at the time. I hope to fix that some day!

Even despite this, and having hardly come in contact with Ultima VI for nearly 10 years, these melodies and chords are in the most literal sense of the word, unforgettable to me. I recalled the "gist" of the music that plays upon boot even after all that time, and figured it would be good practice to cover, though I didn't quite recall exactly how the "Character Creation" and "Introduction" pieces went.

Now I'm definitely biased having heard the music on Adlib emulation first, but I really do feel like this was the sound that the composers/arrangers focused on first in the development of this game, so it was the version I was mostly using as reference for cover (not to mention it's easier translating). It has a unique characteristic to its attack and decay on notes ("twang") that I don't believe can really be captured on stock NES hardware, but I tried my best to replicate it or at least find middle ground and get something that is pleasing to the ear.

This characteristic decay of notes that is so emblematic of the bard-like strumming here is also what lead me to avoid using the Triangle channel as much as I did, as (for the unaware) it has no volume control--it's full blast or nothing, and so simulating the decay of notes on it would be challenging, let alone actually making it sound good if that's even remotely possible (especially when there's so little polyphony like in pieces like these).

I'm very pleased with how the first piece ("Bootup") turned out, but I kind of figured it would do well being so structurally simple. I'm still impressed how well the "character" of the sound translated imo.

The second piece ("Character Creation") was already showing a slight disadvantage compared to Adlib that I could have theoretically smoothed over with an extra Pulse channel on an MMC5 chip, for example, but I still think it sounds more than presentable and I'm still challenging myself to stay on vanilla 2A03. I kind of had no choice but to make the melody go on the Triangle channel, but I feel like its note decay wasn't quite as noticeable or important as the outlining chord strumming, so it was a trade-off I was willing to live with. I tried to make the voicing of the melody a little more "song like" to play to the strengths of the Triangle.

"Introduction" proved fairly challenging in particular, and I do feel like you can hear some compromises as is, but still presentable to my ears. Notably the driving bass eighth notes are now mere blips of audio that had to be combined into arpeggios (but not looped--looped arps just wouldn't sound in character to these pieces imo). Some of this could have been allieviated by utilizing the Triangle for bass, but that would undo the established voicing up to this point and instead I decided to try and combine the Triangle and Noise channels to simulate the unique sound of the drums in the Adlib. Not sure if it was successful, heh.

This turned out to be way more fun than I thought it would be, so I hope you enjoy.

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