Shovel Knight OST by virt (VRC6)

I figure this would be pertinent to nesdev's interests.

NSF download (MP3s, etc. here)

The music was composed in famitracker, though to my understanding the game itself only plays back MP3 recordings, rather than emulating the NSF at runtime (whatever works, I guess).

One interesting thing is that two of the tracks were composed by Manami Matsumae, who did the original Mega Man (tracks 20 and 33 on the NSF).

I wonder, would they get in legal trouble for using a Konami sound expansion without Konami's permission? Or is sound too generic to actually copyright, even if it was used with another company's hardware?

And no surprise, since 20 and 33 are actually the best tracks in the game.

VRC6 produces only pulse and sawtooth waves, which aren't copyrightable. Even Yamaha FM sounds aren't copyrightable by themselves, even though the FM synthesis method used to be patented. Besides, the copyright in an integrated circuit lasts only 10 years, not 95 like everything else. Samplers are where it starts to get gray, but I haven't heard of any lawsuits by a sampler manufacturer for producing a record with the manufacturer's instrument.

Ah, gotcha. Thanks.

A great soundtrack in my opinion, I like many of the songs it brings.

Let's say I made a simple loop using Wacky Worlds for Sega Megadrive / Genesis. The tiny fragments of songs were composed by Jon Baker, and I've assembled a track out of them. Where does the copyright lie?

The legal system does not like the Ship of Theseus philosophical argument.

Yeah, but if it was really a ship of theseus, after composing the song he'd then replace all the samples he used with original samples that sound similar enough.

Have anyone tried to convert it to the NES rom, to be able to run on VRC6 dev-cart?

Considering rainwarrior just created this, I'd say you could do exactly that and use a PowerPak for testing (not identical to actual VRC6 hardware, but you asked about converting it to a "NES ROM", so there you go).

For a VRC6 music cart sold outside East Asia, you'd need not only an appropriate mapper but a dongle to plug into the bottom of a front-loader because I imagine most NES Control Decks aren't audio modded. That is, unless you get rainwarrior to make a soft VRC6, like what he did back in August with CV3 (YouTube; discuss).

It's not going to work as-is, but if you're sufficiently motivated you might be able to convert the banking to run on a VRC6 mapper. (Also, the thing I made doesn't produce ROMs that will run on a PowerPak because it uses the new Mapper 31 that hasn't yet been implemented for PowerPak; though there is also an NROM export option. You can already play NSFs on the PowerPak anyway though.)

The NSF that was distributed is 600k. VRC6 PRG-ROM only goes up to 256k, so right off the bat you need to split it up at least. (I think someone actually did make a 3 NSF splitting of it for PowerPak.)

I think someone "decompiled" the NSFs back into FTM files when they came out, which would be a much better starting point to work from, since you can re-arrange and re-export a lot easier that way. Don't ask me where to find them, though (try googling). A more polite thing to do might just be to ask Virt for the FTMs.


That's more of a "soft MMC5" than a "soft VRC6", though it's kinda halfway in between. VRC6 duty, but no saw. It also explodes your data size, and has no banking capability at this point, so there'd be a lot of work to do splitting it up and adding that.