Lagrange Point translation

Not quite done yet, but really, really, really close.







Coming soon~

Cool! I've been wanting to play that game for quite some time.

That reminds me of the NeonGenesis, I think, translation of the game that could never be completed. Wasn't there a technical reason that it couldn't be made, in that the Englis text couldn't be compressed to fit on the VRC7 cart? If so, how did you manage that?

This is that translation.

There were a lot of things that needed to be taken into consideration, yes. Rom space was one of those. Menu expansion was another. Font compression, crashes, inconsistencies in the translation. More stuff I probably shouldn't talk about. But I've been doing this long enough to know what the best solution was for most of the problems. This is the result. It was an awful lot of work though.

Oh wow, amazing. So once it's done, would it be possible for someone to burn the final translation on some EPROMs and solder it on a LP cart? Or would this only work with something like the PowerPak, since you might need to create a VRC7 'variant' to handle the game's size?

That said, I wish you the best of luck!

I don't see why not - of course, it would only be properly playable on a Famicom (or a sound-modded NES) due to the game's extensive use of VRC7 audio (i.e. 6-channel FM synth).


If that were the case, it would probably fail to work in a whole bunch of emulators as well, since restricting bank counts to what the chip itself supports is a thing that emulators actually do.

Hey! Someone's finally translating Lagrange Point! Cool!


It would probably be unsatisfying to play on the PowerPak, since it has never had VRC7 audio support. I would suspect that the FPGA is not even powerful enough to do so, FM synthesis is considerably more complex than audio used in other expansions. If that's to much for it, perhaps a wavetable based approximation good enough for Lagrange Point could be cooked up? I dunno.

It's awesome to see a translation of this game. Good job.

Many years ago, I played all the way through this game in Japanese, probably not understanding everything that was going on. It'll be fun to finally play through it again and actually know what I'm doing.

It's actually not that hard, just a couple of lookup tables. (the decapped OPL2 and OPL3 only show two lookup tables: log(sin(x)) and exp(x), so you just chain lookups and addition to get FM synthesis.)

Someone's implemented a YM2612 for a Genesis-on-an-FPGA here. They didn't finish it, so I'm not clear if there are some subtle bugs left.


That said, I'm excited to be able to play LP and understand it...

Plus enough state for 12 ADSR envelopes and everything else each oscillator needs, plus one instrument and 15 preset patches (128 bits each), state for all 6 channels, and the memory interface to all of it. There's a lot going on here compared to any of the other expansion audio devices.

I dunno, maybe it's doable, I don't know the limits of the PowerPak's FPGA, but I think it could be out of scope. What's the reason it was never implemented? Everdrive N8 doesn't have a VRC7 emulation either.

If I recall correctly the Mega Everdrive can provide the YM2413 for Master System games (and the VRC7 happens to use similar hardware for sound), so it seems to be feasible for a FPGA.

The biggest problem would be where to connect it honestly. Like, doesn't the NES have the audio lines in the expansion port instead of the cartridge port? Making a companion hardware for the PowerPak (i.e. a separate thing altogether) that connects there would be easier and make more sense I think (although probably more expensive since you'd need to get two things instead of one, but hey at least it's optional if you don't care about it).

Where do you recall that from? I can't find any information to that effect. I would expect that if Krikzz already had a working FPGA YM-2413 he would have reused that code for the Everdrive N8's VRC7 already...

Connecting the audio isn't a problem. There is a now-standard expansion port mod that a lot of PowerPak or Everdrive N8 users have already made for this purpose.

In practice ... I bet the reason it was never implemented is the only game that used it doesn't yet have an english translation, and just adding it for NSF support wasn't sufficiently compelling.

It doesn't matter if it can be implemented in a FPGA, it matters if there is room to implement it into the PowerPAK's FPGA. Maybe it is not large enough to fit it all. It would certainly be nice if full VRC7 was possible on the PowerPAK and was implemented.

Cool ! I've always wanted to play this game, but in Japanese I was quickly stuck somewhere (in a space station) and had no idea where to go.

The problem with the Power Pak is that there's no clue as how one can implement his own mappers in VHDL. This sucks, as I know plenty of VHDL/Verilog (actually that's my real life work), so I'd certainly love to play with implementing my own mappers ! I must say I'm a bit pissed at Bunny Boy for not letting us play with that. (but just a bit of course - don't get me wrong the PowerPak is awesome).

Also most of Lagrange Point's music is terrible, despite using the VRC7
Only the battle theme and a couple of other songs such as the base station's are actually good. Song 7 in the NSF is the absolute worst

I don't think Lagrange Point's music is bad, but I would say that nearly every track is half as short as it should be. I feel like every track is the start of something that would be nice if it didn't loop so quickly. Still, the unique music is one of the big reasons to try playing this one; I wouldn't want to bother playing it silent or SFX only.

If you're looking to make a PowerPak mapper, I know of these resources:
Some example mapper source here: http://www.nespowerpak.com/ (see especially: powerpakdev1.zip)
A few of Loopy's sources: http://home.comcast.net/~olimar/NES/powerpak_loopy_src.zip (see also: http://home.comcast.net/~olimar/NES/)

There are clues, but that's it. Loopy did it, I did it, so it's not impossible. It does require some reverse engineering though. But nowadays you can get it pretty easy by looking at loopy's sources. Sometime in the future I'm also going to release a new version of my mappers (complete rewrite), followed by the source code (VHDL), so that should be able to serve as a template of some sort.

I honestly wonder what this game would sound like if it was localized in the US and had to have the music arranged for the 2A03. I wonder if they would've followed CV3 and made use of arpeggios once in a while.

So what's stopping you from contacting Akio DOBASHI and asking him (though he had zero involvement in CV3)?

Or you could just watch this and appreciate history rather than pondering rewriting it. :P

Sorry for my rude tone, but this kind of thought process and driving force has been EXTREMELY prevalent on this forum in the past few months. I don't know why it's so hard for people to just accept reality + history how it is. I guess the {unrelated} "Why is the SNES on screen color pallete so small?" thread, amongst others, have really set me off. I should probably take a break.

I guess this is a side effect of having nothing new to discuss... We sometimes end up discussing the past, and considering what could have been.

There have been so many arbitrary design decisions made with little to no explanation behind the reasoning, so people ask, or wonder, why they came to be. Why did Nintendo decide to rewire the audio lines to the expansion port? The NES came out in 1985, and the FDS which supported the expanded audio came out in 1986, which leads me to believe Nintendo saw it as a vestigial structure, and decided to remove it. There were also stories that Nintendo originally wanted a 16-bit CPU in the NES, but settled with the 2A03 because it was cheaper. If true, what were they planning on using? Would it have allowed greater freedom when it came to displaying sprites, instead of worrying about (and dealing with) flicker? Speaking of, apparently the 8 sprites per scanline limitation is actually an artificial one, is there any truth behind that? Why did Nintendo impose it, if true? Those sort of questions.

So what's stopping you or anyone else from getting a kickstarter going, tracking down Masayuki UEMURA, and scheduling an interview? He's given one before, although under Nintendo's own supervision. There are lots of logistics involved here, but if Nick Dwyer of Red Bull Music Academy, re: Diggin' In The Carts, can accomplish all of that, then so can you.

But the answers won't be available much longer given the ages of most of the folks involved in the original Famicom/NES design; Gunpei YOKOI is gone, and Hiroshi YAMAUCHI also passed away recently.

The only others I could think of asking would be Eiji AONUMA or possibly Kazuhiko TANIGUCHI (who might not know directly, but might know who to get in touch with). Alternately you could talk to Yuichi "Rolling" UCHIZAWA of Famitsu Magazine, who also might know who to get in touch with. Same goes for Hally.

All this speculative jacking off I see going on seems completely pointless since the only people who would have definitive answers to these questions would be the original designers. Even things like the Visual2C02, despite decapping, are still "speculative" in the sense that while people can make some guesses as to the original intentions, the actual truth/reality behind the decisions are only known by those who were involved in its creation. For example, how would anyone have known that Yoko SHIMOMURA had to tie an EPROM to a string + lower it down to the testers a floor below her at night to get around after-hours building security?

I'd be happy to donate money to this cause (think US$1000 (not a typo)) even though I have absolutely ZERO interest in the "whys" of a console's design. What I like are stories and tales from those times, i.e. actual nostalgia.

Very funny story. Although if they can't use the lift (elevator for american people) why can't they take the stairs ?




Sorry but I disagree. Normally in a company, someone who directs a project or even just participate in the design is asked to do a full reports where all the design choices are explained. Also, normally in a company those reports are archived and kept for a very long time, especially if they are for a major project in the company such as what the Famicom is for Nintendo. So if Nintendo is a well organized company, they should have all this information at hand no matter how many employees left the company or dies. Or is this way of working exclusive to Switzerland or Europe ?


I don't think it's for the pas few months, it has always been like that as far as I can remember. And I don't see the issue about guessing things as long as the author of the guess doesn't make it as real.

And to answer OneCrudeDude's question, I guess it would sound like all other Konami NES games. Why would it sound different from them, just because the original Famicom had expansion sound ? If they managed to downgrade the sound for CV3, the'd do it for LP. But who knowns maybe they composed the sound for 2A03 alone in the 1st place, and re-arranged it for more channels when they were sure about the mapper the game was using ?

(Sorry Koitsu, I feel you'll be mad after reading this part of my post, but this don't break the forum rules, so I won't refrain doing useless speculation just for you. But yeah you are right this is useless).

As for the powerpak mappers it's right now too late in the night, but I'll have a look at it whenever I'll have time for it. Thanks for sharing the mapper source code, I'm eager to see it.

I'm with Koitsu on this one. They might seem arbitrary to someone who does no research, knows nothing about chip design, or didn't spend an hour just reasoning it out silently.

Sprite limitations per scanline, for example. This is not arbitrary but a precise result of strict mathematical reality. Knowing the clock speed of the PPU, the prefetch time available in Hblank, and subtracting it from whatever PPU resources the BG hogged in this time, the designers had a range of bytes of sprite table data to fetch safely.

OK, so many people are non-technical. Fine. But I'm similarly annoyed in other forums where questions like "What was X designer in 1986 thinking when he....? Does anybody here know?"

ONLY that designer could possibly know his thought processes, so yeah, it's either unknowable or will take an interview of the original person to find out.

Posts like those sound to me like slash fiction speculation.

There is time to fetch 16 sprites, and the PPU uses half of those for useless nametable fetches.

@Bregalad:

Actually man, zero problem with what you said (forum rules or otherwise). No need to worry about upsetting me. I think diverse discussion is good. You and I may disagree often but that's perfectly cool.

I think in the case of Lagrange Point, though, the interview with Akio DOBASHI implies Konami knew right up front they wanted to use FM for the game music; they wanted actual J-pop artists doing the music, they wanted it to be something amazing and mindblowing (e.g. sound quality never before heard on the Famicom). But I see your point too -- I suppose it's just as possible someone during the early development stages said "hey, what about a US/EU release? We couldn't use VRC7's FM there...". Who knows though, right? It's another one of those things where sitting down with the actual game designers + asking would shed lots of light on the subject. "Did you plan on using FM from the beginning when this game was designed, or did you consider using only the on-CPU audio exclusively?"

As for reports and design documents being kept + accessible by future generations within a company: I have no actual way of determining what the "norm" is, even for the United States (we're simply too big + too many companies), but the place I've worked for tended to not have "archives" of historically designed stuff. A lot of things get accomplished via Email, and big corporations (and sometimes small companies too) have very strict Email retention policies solely to minimise any kind of corporate impact in the case of lawsuits. I do know that Microsoft has a really neat/interesting thing that I've never seen anywhere else though: an actual archive room. But no other company I've worked for had ANYTHING like this. But Microsoft actually does have an Email retention policy and it's fairly short (I think 6 months? 1 year? Something like that, it's been a while), and it was probably brought on by repeated legal cases where Emails were brought into court as evidence of executives deciding something awful. We did have actual design documentation though, but whether or not that stuff got actually backed up/archived indefinitely is unknown.

Not really - more sprites would've required more secondary OAM (requiring extra time to clear it, and there'd be less time available to actually find them in the scanline), and increasing it in a way other than doubling it would've made the hardware rather more complicated (and doubling it would've left insufficient time to evaluate all of them).

There's also the fact that the extra sprite renderers would've dramatically increased the die size, making the chip more expensive to produce...

I've used many buildings have an elevator to go in and up, but the stairs are only to the outside. Any door to a stairwell automatically locks behind you. This allows a fire escape (or just convenient exit), but prevents people from entering a floor they don't have permission for via the stairwell. This is in combination with some sort of permission system for the elevator to get in, like keycards, or timed access. In practice, people may often leave the stairway doors propped open so they can get back in easily.


I don't think that's normal in every company. Lots of companies have very different practices. The games industry in the US is especially loose in this respect, but it is a volatile industry, with rampant layoffs and employees rarely staying at a company more than a few years, old companies go defunct all the time, new companies appearing, etc... I don't know about Nintendo though, it's a long running company and there is a stronger culture of remaining loyal to the company in Japan. It might be a better place for that kind of record-keeping. If the company was for a military application, or made devices where fatal accidents are a factor (e.g. automobiles, aviation), I would imagine they keep a lot better records than for something like video game software, where the worst consequence is usually just that the game is bad and the company goes bankrupt, and products aren't maintained much longer than their initial production, etc.

(Wow, sorry how off topic this has become.)

What if some obscure Japanese computer mag (or heck, even someone from another part of the world) already tracked down Uemura to ask him, for example, "why does sprite zero need to overlap with an opaque background pixel to set the sprite zero hit flag? Why not just set the flag when sprite zero is fetched?" Can a Japanese speaker here rule that out?

Some other stuff I would ask him, did anyone anticipate the advantage of being able to switch chr banks over spending cpu time filling vram? Did anyone imagine a game like Castlevania 3 (Akumajou Densetsu) or Kirby's Adventure would be possible on Famicom, or did you only envision single-screen games for the platform?

Oh thank you for pointhing that out. You know I don't speak japanese outside of a few isolated easy words...


This is a terrible example. Nobody outside of this forum would ever care about a detail like that, and the guy is retired and there is *zero* chance he would remember details like that.


Again, terrible example. But considering how games in 1983 area were, the answer is most probably "no".



This, however, is a very good question. I think everyone would care about the answer, as it's less technical and more general.


My god I can't belive anyone is stupid enough to build building like that. Sounds terribly inpractical and unsafe. What if there is an electricity shortage ? What if the elevators simply stop functionning for some random mechanical or electrical failure ?
As someone who almost never uses any elevator in my life, this is shocking. You know, we in europe know how to use energy only when it is really needed, and we don't waste megawats of electrical power or oil for nothing just because we're too lazy to use our feets, like north americans do. As for Japan, I have no idea which trend they're following.

I'm not an architect (and the subject if off topic for this forum, let alone this thread), but since I've lived and worked in buildings of this type, I can answer some of it:
1. There are always multiple elevators. In the case of a failure of a single elevator, a different one is used and the other gets put under repair quickly. Everybody complains about how slow the elevator is until it is fixed.
2. In the case of an emergency like a power failure, people can always get out through the stairwell, but again, it is likely that people will prop open or otherwise disable the locks on the doors to get in. Some buildings have systems that automatically unlock emergency doors in case of fire alarm, for example. Buildings are often equipped with a backup generator as well, so temporary power can be applied to an elevator in an emergency.
3. In a building with many floors, nobody would use the stairwell to enter the building. Are you going to tell me that in Switzerland men in suits climb the stairs to the 10th floor every day? There are alternative ways to get in for an emergency, but the elevator would be the normal method of entry even if the stairwell wasn't one-way locked.

No, I'm just telling that buildings with more than 5 floors are rare here, and that anyways they always have non-emmergency stairs. Sure there is some (and even I would use elevator for more than 5 stairs), but they are rare. Even in a tall building, if you're on the 10th floor and if you just need to pass by the 9th floor, it seems terribly inneficient and slow to be forced to use an elevator to do that when you could use stairs.

If a company owns two consecutive floors of a building, I have seen internal stairs built through the floor to handle this case. If you want to spitball other hypothetical cases, there are likely practical solutions, but I'm only a person who has worked in more than one building like this. If you want insight into their design you really need to ask an architect.

I have no argument about whether it is a bad or good design, I've just been there, and it works well enough most of the time. I'd personally not prefer to be encumbered by stairwell limitations for the sake of security (much like I'd prefer not to be encumbered by a 10NES lockout chip) but in practice it has seemed OK to me. It's certainly a very common security design for tall buildings in North America, so it appears that many think it's a good implementation.

Anyhow, obviously it is very inconvenient in some cases. Shimomura's example that started this discussion is one such case.

Yes, and if they'd have used stairs but some kind of security access door for the floors (which is common here) then Shimonura would have had the exact same problem anyways.

The Youtube video I linked of Akio DOBASHI has excellent English translations (click "CC" button at bottom of Youtube video bar). (I know, it's a bit confusing because some of the Red Bull Music Academy videos have embedded subtitles, while others don't)

And the answer would be interesting. The designers probably expected games to become marginally more complex, but not epic 20-hour monsters that scroll in 4 directions like Final Fantasy.

Maybe we should leave the sprite zero thing alone. They added a scanline counter with MMC3 and 5 (As with the Gameboy) so they surely realized how much it sucked.

When the console was created, they were anticipating it being able to handle whatever was at the arcade, which most of the time were single screen games. However, because of the NES' ability to scroll, games were not limited to just single screen games. They probably were inspired by Mappy to include scrolling, which to my knowledge is the first (Japanese) video game to feature scrolling. Mappy came out the same year as the Famicom, so it probably wasn't a coincidence. There was also Defender before that, but I doubt that game was ever released in Japan. That said, games became more ambitious as the technology grew, and despite being CNROM games, Adventure Island and SMB have loads of content for such small games.

Jeez Louise, I apologize for making that statement to derail this thread to oblivion. What I actually meant to say was "if this game was another RPG with 2A03 music instead, no one would care for it". Literally the only reason people care about LP is because it uses the VRC7, had it used the stock audio hardware, it would've been overlooked and called "another RPG for the system, whoopee".

So VRC7 audio is Lagrange Point's gimmick. Is Sunsoft 5B audio Gimmick's gimmick?

Vanguard is a Japanese-made game that had scrolling (in many directions) in 1981, and Rally-X had scrolling in 1980, so there are certainly earlier scrolling games than Mappy, even if you limit to only Japanese ones. I have no idea what the earliest one was, but I don't really care either.

Gimmick is a very good game, and the soundtrack is still great in its 2A03 version too. It would still be worth playing if the 5B experiment hadn't been involved.

Er, it's likely that in 1985 Nintendo was already working on the FDS. In fact I imagine that's the very reason why the audio lines are there, can you imagine connecting an add-on through the frontloader slot? =P They probably wired the audio lines on the assumption only the disk drive would use them, only to find out everybody switched back to ROMs before the disk could be considered in the US at all in the first place.

If they really thought it was useless then it's likely the audio lines would not be there at all, not even in the expansion slot. This is what Sega did with the Master System after all.

It's funny because you are probably absolutely right, but I haven't even realized that yet.

It's also one of the very few Konami's RPG before Suikoden. (the other 2 games which use VRC6 audio being the other 2)

I think it's interesting because those games doesn't have the "Konami" feeling all their NES titles have. The pause sound effect is absent, and so is their special sprite flickering pattern. They don't sound like other Konami NES games who have a particular sound to them, but the reason why is obvious

Plus Lagrange Point was produced as part of a project with Famicom Magazine where readers submitted their own story/enemy ideas and designs, which got used in the game.

I have LP, and some of the songs are good, but much of it is totally wasted potential. Especially considering some of the fantastic OPL music in some MSX games.

You're forgetting Madara 2 on the SNES. Also Cave Noire on GB, which admittedly is more of a roguelike, but still.

You should be getting paid for this. I totally see this restolen by Konami and sold as some sort of "Virtual Console" thing. Is money just not your thing; or do you not like assumed financial pressures?

There's a story there. But I can say with pretty much absolute certainty that it won't get picked up by Konami for US release any time soon.

But you're right, and it's something I've been working on quietly in the background. Just not with LP. You'll know if and when anything comes of it.

(Now available!)


Aeon Genesis has, at long last, released their translation patch for the highly-anticipated NES RPG, Lagrange Point, made famous for its inclusion of on-board FM audio. It's worth noting that this is the eventual end-result of the same translation project started by J2E Translations more than ten years ago; it was handed off to Aeon Genesis after necrosaro left to pursue his doctorate. The translation is complete, fully tested, and hopefully bug-free, so enjoy!

Relevant linkage: Aeon Genesis

Woot!

Welp, it finally happened. First, Bio Force Ape was found, now Langrange Point has been finally translated...what else is left for the NES? It almost feels like the end of an era, but there's still the elusive "Yeah Yeah Beebiss I".

That said, good work. You deserve the rest.

I still really wanna see the NES Sim City prototype. Actually I just want to hear it, really. Very interested to know what Soyo Oka came up with on the NES.

There's always Megami Tensei 2 with its extra sound chip!

There's Metal Slader Glory, the biggest FC game ever released (not counting Chineese chep pirate suff like multicarts or this terrible FF7 demake)

SimCity. If not that, I'd say creating free engines for use in platformers, overhead action adventures, etc., so that ROM hackers don't have to start from something proprietary.

Damn, I forgot about SimCity. I heard that's locked up somewhere in Nintendo's safes. I hope they managed to dump the game data and preserved it, assuming Nintendo even cares about that.

Has anyone tried putting this on an actual Lagrange Point cart yet?

I've played through a bunch of it so far, and it's looking really good. My only minor complaint is that Cornarea (which is capitalized as "CornArea" in one place) wasn't called "Corneria", because that would've been funny.

The only bug I've observed so far is one that was present in the original game - in the NPC Buy interface, if you press Up and A with just the right timing (similar to the Spazer+Plasma trick in Super Metroid), you can purchase the "Next" entry, which gives you a semi-random item (based on the shop you're at and the section you're viewing).

There's a decent walkthrough of the game over here (which also mentions the Up+A trick above, among other things), though it's in Japanese - Google Translate does a semi-decent job on it, but if there's interest, I'll see if I can provide a better English translation (including images).

So now we have four spellings:

• Cornelia (originally intended, and used in revised translations of the first Final Fantasy)
• Coneria (first translation of Final Fantasy)
• Corneria (Star Fox)
• Cornarea/Corn Area (AG's Lagrange Point translation)

On the one hand, there exist other FF allusions in LP. But on the other hand, there's also a "Corn Base".

We localized a few of the area names a very, very little bit; Cornarea was one of them. There's a Corn Area, Potato Area, and Orange Area, and in localizing we figured we'd give a very slight tilt of the head to other famous similar-sounding names. But all the areas and cities, with the exception of the Isis City capital, are named after the essential building blocks of society - food, minerals, energy.

Likewise, I'll assume you chose "Isis City" over "Raqqa" for good reason.

He-hey, it's Super C/Operation C all over again!

YM2413 is widely avaliable and not that expensive to bother with fpga implementation.

Please note that the patch has reached version 1.01. Fixes, from the readme:

--Fixes issue where some characters (notably Tic) gained inappropriately high stats at level up
--Fixes issue where weapons of type Chemical, Special, and ???? displayed as Electric, Plasma, and Sonic respectively

Thanks folks!

The hardware patches used in the VRC7 are very different than those in the YM2413, so it's not really very appropriate to use for Lagrange Point. If you're happy with the wrong sound, you might as well just do a simple FPGA implementation that plays the same tone for every patch.

I'm not going to speculate about how expensive/difficult it would be to add a YM2413 the PowerPak or Everdrive N8, but I doubt current owners of these would want to buy a new one just for a YM2413 (especially when it isn't going to make Lagrange Point sound correct).

But how different are they? Because if ultimately the underlying algorithms are similar then the point stands, it's still feasible.

Also gosh, we have an entire SNES in a FPGA, are we seriously arguing that a FM chip would not fit in a FPGA? I assume we're talking about small FPGAs because otherwise I don't see how it's a problem.

And I'd insist on just making it a separate add-on that connects in the expansion port, independent of the flashcarts (since you're already going to need a separate device anyway). I guess it's probably useless as-is if only one game ever makes use of it, but maybe later homebrew could make use of it if present (much like how Master System games can use either the PSG or the FM add-on).

Not "a" FPGA.
The FPGA in the PowerPak, a Xilinx XC2S30.

I'm actually pretty certain it would fit, but you'd have to use the block RAM to hold everything, and implement everything as the ≈same state machine that's used in the original hardware. (After all, it only has one pair of lookup tables)

The algorithms are the same, VRC7 is a subset of YM2143. The problem is that the 15 built-in patches are custom for the VRC7. There's no way to modify a YM2413 to get those sounds.

I know, you are upset, but same question asked by another person. Do you have solid evidence such as photo of silicon or it is just your imagination?

Don't attribute emotions to me. That's very rude, and has nothing to do with this.


If you want to argue that the YM2413 and the VRC7 have the same internal patch set, you are just wrong, I'm sorry.

We do not currently have a decap picture of the VRC7, but this is most refined version of the internal patch set we have: http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?t=9141

l_oliveira posted a side by side sound comparison from a YM2413 and VRC7 at some point, but I can't seem to find them at the moment. Edit: they are in this thread: http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=8833

Just in case you want even more evidence that they're not the same patches: http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm13564742

...except that you need to create an account to even watch stuff on nicovideo...

http://nicoviewer.net/sm13564742 , then. Or use youtube-dl, which has grown the ability to download from niconico without logging in.

I don't know why there is the abundance of web interfaces for niconico, and why the primary one still requires logging in...

I think Nico Nico Douga requires creating an account in order to build a foreign language wall to keep out filthy gaijin.

Site is horrid slow anyway. I have an account there and normally can't even be arsed to log in because the videos take an ice age to load.

Ok, but...

viewtopic.php?p=97361#p97361

i would prefer to hear opinion of Shiru or TmEE, until that happend VRC7=YM2413-rythms

Don't want any flame, but when you say "different", you should be more specific. Something like

patch #A instrument #1 YM2413.ogg
patch #A instrument #1 VRC7.ogg

added...

And i very doubt, there is any random factors

What you asked for is exactly what he linked to.

Just wonder, why this

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/883356/VRC7_and_YM2413.ogg

and this

http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/File ... _intro.ogg

sounds so different? And how it will sounds, if you play separately?

Anyway i would prefer to hear opinion of Shiru.

If you want to hear them separately, you can separate the left and right channels in any audio editor, or simply pan your player hard left or hard right to isolate one of the channels. They sound different because of the different patch sets. Most (or possibly all) of the built-in patches are different. I feel I am repeating myself here, though; are you asking a different question?

What does shiru have to do with it? The best authority on VRC7 to YM2413 comparisons is l_oliveira.

...

They sound different because they are different songs - the latter is from Lagrange point (and is the one that really matters here), and the most effective way to listen to it is using headphones so you can hear the VRC7 in your left ear and the YM2413 in your right ear and observe just how different they are.

Has the prices on ebay always been this crazy? Can't afford it.

A couple of years ago it seemed to go for about $25 regularly. I guess it's suddenly become a bit more popular.