Super Mario World soundtrack "restored" with original samples

[beschizza]

Originally published at: Super Mario World soundtrack "restored" with original samples | Boing Boing

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[cannibalpeas]

Man, I can’t hear that castle theme without the sound of the weird door opening fart noise a few second in.

[G_r_ld_z_n_r]

Hell, I worked for Dynamix in the 90s and some of those old games had options to output MIDI for a Roland MT-32 synth. I still have one in a closet somewhere.

[buddybradley]

@beschizza

Running the Hang On Theme’s data bit by bit from an emulator to a FLAC file doesn’t recover lost perfection, it finds a headache.

uh yeah I thought I was tough but I could only handle 7 seconds of that

[capnjimbo]

Unrestored version for comparison:

- YouTube

@beschizza

the speakers in the cabinets were heavily baffled, softening the music and giving it a bass boost.

Conversely, one of the people working on the OG Mac wanted to have a strategic dime-sized hole drilled in every case just to remove the baffling of the startup beep. Jobs declined.

[hngr]

raises a curious copyright question: if Koji Kondo or an engineer sampled, converted and compressed the instrument waveforms off of commercial instruments, wouldn’t that open Nintendo to copyright infringement claims? (under the climate we have now, not back then)

Sort of like how font foundries state in their licenses that you can make a logo out of their font and print that unlimited times but if you take that font file and embed it into your app you have to negotiate a much more expensive, ongoing license (stupid, but some do that). I remember some publishers having an umbrage over vector font files converted into bitmap fonts for an embedded device back in 2000, and they had to license it from Bitstream or somesuch.

I had assumed all this time they used original FM synthesis for their instruments, not samples. I don’t think entire tracks were compressed and put into the ROM cartridge, just instrument samples driven by MIDI tracks.

[the_borderer]

@beschizza

Here’ s something to consider. Just as old pixel art was often drawn with blurry CRT displays and shadowy gamma curves in mind…

CGA graphics are what I always find amazing

4 colours becomes 16 colours if you know what you are doing.

I knew someone who managed to get 256 colours on a ZX Spectrum using similar tricks, but it was migraine and epilepsy inducing.

[beschizza]

@the_borderer

I knew someone who managed to get 256 colours on a ZX Spectrum using similar tricks, but it was migraine and epilepsy inducing.

Similar on other 8-bits such as the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC.

I think the black magic of all that stuff comes from a better understanding of the off-the-shelf cathode ray tube controllers used on old 8-bits to generate a TV signal. Clever programming lets them be abused almost like simple, weird, hinky shaders.