RushJet1

It is pretty simple, he might add these features later, but there's no way to automate the vibrato, do arpeggios of any kind or any kind of linear pitch changes. The only pitch changes you can do vary wildly depending on the note you choose because it's all relative to the note's value in the system. For instance, to do vibrato, I had to create the pitch bends manually that would simulate that sound. If the note being played is an octave higher though, the vibrato is twice as strong as a result. Also, because SASS is a system where each channel gets its own text file, in each note is a new line, I figured writing music that way would be extremely difficult, especially for making complex music. I built my own set of tools in c# to convert famitracker text exports to this format. I'm going to make a video about this in a couple weeks. I might polish this tool up and release it eventually, but it is still pretty rough and expects some pretty specific input that is not correct syntax for famitracker in any way. I took an "add features as they are needed" approach, which comically saw me add the final feature for the trailer music just a couple weeks ago. Until that point, the engine was not able to detect changes in tempo, and I thought that would be much harder than it turned out to be, so I did it by hand in the couple of tracks that required it for the soundtrack. It was such an easy change that I was mildly upset by how easy it was I also compiled my first track nearly a year ago and realized that it took 7KB of space, which was a problem if I was going to have about 30 tracks in 224 kilobytes of space. That 224 KB also includes the samples being used. I realized that you can use patterns to basically make groups of notes into functions that you can call, and this could save space for repeated notes, so I made a second tool that automates this process and heavily reduces file sizes. that first file got reduced to about 3.5 KB instead of 7, but the most extreme reduction was from 35KB to 15KB. Using samples was initially also pretty unusual because it requires 8 bit signed samples, and most sound programs are going to try to do 8 bit unsigned instead, but that's not that big of a deal. I tried to make a kind of conglomeration of Atari sounds in Nintendo sounds, since I generally make NES music. So in the soundtrack, you will hear things like Atari TIA waves 1, 6, 7, NES 25% square wave, noise, DPCM and triangle, and vrc6 sawtooth. Most of the bass in the game (including the trailer above) uses the NES triangle + TIA type 1 sound. Usually I would use NES triangle plus sawtooth, but the TIA 1 wave actually sounds really nice with the triangle, and they complement each other pretty well. I think you got some pretty interesting sounds out of the TIA that I don't hear in other Atari 2600 and 7800 games. I also made a few mock-ups that I sent to Osman of a few tracks from Rikki & Vikki rendered on the TIA. They work okay, but I chose some of the more simple tracks. There are definitely tracks on this soundtrack that would never work on the TIA. The trailer music track uses three modified tracks from the game kind of stuck together and shortened. The first and last tracks are pretty much verbatim from the game, minus some shortening, but the middle track is like an entirely new remix of another track in the game.

Number Munchers in Pac-Man?

Thought I'd make this as a test. Turned out OK, but some notes are still off. https://www.dropbox.com/s/enofcdmifaxr2zu/kraid.mp3?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/776n1ixywtcrwp8/kraid_music.bin?dl=0

The big bosses really are disappointing... it's like "oh neat, it's more detailed and big than most stuff you see" immediately followed by "wait, there's zero animation on any of this." Even tiny things like slightly different facial expressions on the final boss when you hit it, or having points on it explode or something as targets would have gone a long way. That and the false difficulty of hitting most enemies so many times kinda sucks. This is one of those games that, with a few tweaks, could be amazing. You could fix this with a quick romhack: 1) make the controls correctly overhead- most isometric games do this, or have a fully 45 degree tilted mode like zaxxon. Maybe make this optional because I can totally see why they did this the way they did- if you're playing with the original joystick, moving diagonally can be annoying. 2) lower enemy health to reasonable levels, and also lower the player's health to compensate. This would make the game feel more directly challenging without making it feel like a slog to get through. The sprites range from "pretty good" to "generic" like he said in the review, but the backgrounds are nice, and the scrolling is nice. Maybe edit the music if possible? Some TIA music is surprisingly atmospheric:

Huh wow, there are a bunch of these: http://blog.kevtris.org/blogfiles/nes%20tia/

Rockman 4 MI- it's a hack, but it's an extensive one that does all kinds of stuff the original Mega Man games never dreamed of. Check out 2:00, 3:30, 9:25, 12:56, 43:19, 1:11:33 for some cool effects. There's a new NES homebrew called Micro Mages that's being released soon. It's 40K with no mappers and is quite impressive for those facts.

It should have been called the Atari 10400 obviously.

Made another track, a cover of the Game Boy Mega Man II title screen: m2t.bin

The problem at 30 seconds is that I didn't know how to properly loop audio in TIAtracker at the time. Try this file instead: tiatune_fixedloop.bin

The Ataribox/VCS is pretty interesting. I'd love to see it succeed and have a legit "modern Atari console" actually competing with the PS4/Xbone/Switch but I doubt that's going to happen, given the reveal of some of the specs lately. I have 2 major problems with this: 1) Why call it the Atari VCS? This is just confusing for people who are familiar with the old systems, and everyone else only knows the old system as the "2600" so the "VCS" label is lost on them.... 2) I guess they got a really good deal on the AMD Bristol Ridge-based APUs since AMD probably wants to clear those out... but seriously, it would have been way better power-wise to go with one of the new Ryzen 2200/2400g chips. I mean they're targeting 300 dollars with this machine, so might as well go for performance that at least is in the same ballpark as the other systems. The Bristol Ridge chip will probably look weak compared to the Switch unless they seriously run it at high clocks....

Made this with TIATracker. I originally wrote this in a different format to emulate the 2600's pitches, and thought "why not make this for the actual machine itself?" Seems to have gone pretty well. I attached a ROM of this track. It was recorded in Stella using the "stereo" option to separate the tracks, then mixed back to mono. tiatune.bin