That is really fascinating, thanks for sharing that.
Awesome read. Thanks a lot!
That's cool. And so I definitely know Castlevania III's music was intentionally made for the VRC6 and then dumbed down to the normal sound channels, because I always wondered if the normal version would have come first and then they would have enhanced it to use more channels, since some songs sounds better in CV3 than in Akumajo Densetsu in my opinion.
Also it's fun seeing how everyone that don't know anything about NESdev says the VRC6 is a powerfull mapper and that the game has to be dumped down to the NES for the MMC5, when actually the MMC5 is far more powerfull than the VRC6 and that the graphics of CV3 were in fact enhanced from the japanese version. Only the music was dumbed down, but again it almost sounds cleared and better in some places, and personally I like CV3 much better than Akumajou Densetsu (altough both are amazing).
Bregalad wrote:
That's cool. And so I definitely know Castlevania III's music was intentionally made for the VRC6 and then dumbed down to the normal sound channels, because I always wondered if the normal version would have come first and then they would have enhanced it to use more channels, since some songs sounds better in CV3 than in Akumajo Densetsu in my opinion.
Also it's fun seeing how everyone that don't know anything about NESdev says the VRC6 is a powerfull mapper and that the game has to be dumped down to the NES for the MMC5, when actually the MMC5 is far more powerfull than the VRC6 and that the graphics of CV3 were in fact enhanced from the japanese version. Only the music was dumbed down, but again it almost sounds cleared and better in some places, and personally I like CV3 much better than Akumajou Densetsu (altough both are amazing).
I clicked the link to read about that too.
They also say that Akumajou Densetsu has impossibly great graphics on the clock tower gears compared to CV3 when I'm pretty sure the graphics are exactly the same. I went to level 2 of Akumajou Densetsu to see if it was true, but I think it's a load of crap because the gear looks just like it does on CV3.
But I agree that some of the music sounds better in CV3. I don't like how since they have all these extra sound channels in AD they feel they need to have a million of them playing each part. It's nice to back up a sound channel with another for echoing or sustain, but sometimes it sounds deluded.
An example of CV3's music being better would be the ship stage. It just has a better appeal to it, and it's more clear. It doesn't sound so "synthy", it just sounds more clear.
I'd say that : Beginning, Stream, Dead Beat, Nightmare, Aquarius, Destiny, Encounter and Epitath sounds significantly better on the MMC5, probably because of a clearer sound and a softer triangle rather than a hard aggressive sawtooth for the bass.
I also think that : Demon Seed, Deja Vu, Riddle and Flashback sounds significantly better on the VRC6, because additional voices and richer sounds are better suited for those tracks.
The other songs sounds equally well in either version in my opinion. So overall I guess the MMC5 "wins".
However this is highly subjective. It could also be the emotional factor, when I first played CV3 it was the MMC5 version so I loved the music without suspecting the existance of the VRC6 version, and that habbit could have made me like the VRC6 version well.
And yes for the graphics there isn't much a difference, in fact the graphics were improved for the MMC5 version. As far I can tell :
- Some fire the dragon tweens boss spreads looks orange instead than red
- Graphics of the Alucard level improved a little and are green instead of pink.
- On a falling bridge, the bricks are aligned when they switch from BG to sprites instead of being slightly off like the VRC6 version
- The statues' breast were censored, but this isn't really a mapper issue.
- In Aquarius level, there is no glitches at the end when the water is rising.
- When you open or close a door, the screen does not shake (or is this an emulation issue ?)
- There is a gothic font instead of a normal font. Hironically, the Japanese Super Castlevania IV got a gothic font while the exported version have a normal font. So each country got one of each heh.
Bregalad wrote:
- On a falling bridge, the bricks are aligned when they switch from BG to sprites instead of being slightly off like the VRC6 version, and are the same color as their BG counterpart instead of just using the hero's palette.
Actually, when I played CV3 last, there was this level where blocks fell from the top of the screen to stack up from the bottom so you had to climb to the top. When these blocks were sprites, they just used the hero's palette. When I switched to Alucard, the blocks weren't orange, but pink/red.
Sorry, I just made this up. It seems falling bricks just are always the good color in some places, and hero's color in other places, and that in both versions. I fixed that in the list.
"I MADE!"
Old video game composers are so inspiring and awesome.
It is funny to me how we've all adapted to and often fallen in love with the 2A03's limitations, but to the old school composers the limitations (3 channels, sampling individual bass notes on the sample channel, etc) were annoying and kept them home from their wives on weekdays.
Looks like there was some low tech love though, even then:
"... for Contra and Gradius I did have to scale down the music from the arcade -- make it work on a low-tech machine. In fact, it was when I started to do this work, that's when I really started to feel emotional about the work I was creating, when I started thinking, "OK, I have to do a really good job with this.""
Quote:
1UP: Yeah. These songs are so energetic -- they're over so quickly, but I'm sure it was a lot of work to create them.
HM: We were creating the music in hexadecimal. It goes 1 to 9 then A to F. Yeah, nostalgia...that's what I feel from this. For Contra, we developed a way to create an echo sound with just one a single sound channel instead of two. Normally you'd need two, but we managed to make it work with just one, which left me two other channels to work with. That made the sound thicker and deeper thanks to the delay. (hums the theme)
Anyone know how they pulled that off?
@MetalSlime : How they get the idea or how they managed to do it?
I guess that's when a note is keyed off, instead of having the volume going instantly to zero, it goes to a quiet level instead so it sounds like echo.
Also more advanced Konami seems to be able to interleave echoed notes in the melody. To play for example :
C - C - G - G - A - A - G
(with short notes) it would do :
C (loud) - silent - C (loud) - C (quiet) - G (loud) - C (quiet) - G (loud) - G (quiet) - A (loud) - G (quiet) -A (loud) - A (quiet) - G (loud) - A (quiet) - silent - G (quiet)
This only works for simple rythm patterns tough.
This more advanced technique can be heard in "Sappy" from
Tetrisphere.usf, in "Troika" from
Opentris.nsf, and in the GBA demo
"Kilken" by Calodox. The slow part of "Jungle Hijinxs" from
Donkey Kong Country tried to use this, but the composer forgot to make the "quiet" notes quiet enough.