♫Scene 7-1 BGM (TMNT 3: The Manhattan Project) SNES Arrangement - NintendoComplete

This is an arrangement of Kozo Nakamura's Scene 7-1 BGM from Konami's 1991 NES game, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project. I have arranged it for native playback on SNES hardware, and the audio was recorded directly from a launch-model SNES console.
Here's a track from my favorite Turtles game on the NES. These noisy, punchy tracks that Konami were always so good at are so much fun to cover!
For this track, I strove to get the samples sounding as clean as possible by attempting to compensate for the SNES's usual muddling of the high end. What do you think? I was pleased with the result, but I'd like to know if you guys think it sounds better with the instrument sounds being so heavily preprocessed, or any thoughts you might have about the mix in general.
Thanks for listening!
Since a couple of people requested here, here is a link to the original .spc file that I recorded this from: drive.google.c...
If you'd like to hear any more of my arrangements, you can find the playlist here: • Game Music Remixes/Cov...
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NintendoComplete (www.nintendocom...) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!

[@NintendoComplete]

Here's a tune from my favorite NES Turtles game, decked out in trumpets and orchestra hits for the SNES. Thanks for listening!

[@majorminor5698]

Playthrough Metal Gear for SNES

[@NintendoComplete]

@@majorminor5698 There isn't a Metal Gear for SNES

[@Dorian_Scott]

Requirements for 90s Beat Em' Up games: 1: They *MUST* have a _"Death Star"_ looking level in them ( _"Technodrome"_ in this case) 2: They *MUST* have an elevator/escalator stage _"TMNT 3"_ on NES is very underrated. Nice cover, NC! 👍

[@NintendoComplete]

Tyvm! Oh yeah, it's not a 90s brawler if it doesn't have at least one elevator sequence. I think Final Fight pretty much codified that.

[@sudacagamer]

"underrated" LOL

[@josecarrilloii4036]

*S.N.E.S.* for me!

[@snesfan8935]

Sounds really authentically.

[@NintendoComplete]

Thanks! :)

[@Glux247]

DAMN, Whole soundtrack remake when? This is freaking AWESOME!

[@HsienKoMeiLingFormerYANG]

Nice to hear the presentation.

[@vgaoct91]

The SNES ver. of this tune rocks! Yet I do wonder how one can make the "Heys" in the soundchip?

[@NintendoComplete]

Thanks! Voices are done the exact same way as music. Every sound the SNES plays is actually a tiny digital sound clip, usually looped to create extended notes out of small waveforms. You can use samples of anything, like speech, saw waves, or actual recordings of drums, trumpets, or whatever. I recorded the "hey" sample from the first arcade game for this. It sounded a lot better than the voice samples that the NES game used for some of its music, and I'm pretty certain that they just downsampled the Hey! from the arcade game for TMNT3, anyway.

[@ikelee]

My favourite tune from the NES trilogy! Sounds awesome

[@hitmangfx7162]

The original is one of my favorite NES tunes and I much prefer this version. It retains the excitement and tempo, but gives the instrument selection a much more diverse feel. Harder to do than it actually sounds sometimes. Bravo! I'll be checking out your other arranges.

[@BlockbusterPlotMaster]

Good Remix. Also a great game

[@Dorian_Scott]

I've always felt that both this game and *_"TMNT 2: The Arcade Game"_* on NES should've been on the SNES. Hell, that system was what you'd see everybody play in the early 90s. *NOBODY* played the NES anymore, so why it release on *_that_* ?

[@NintendoComplete]

Thanks!

[@AlidarJarok1]

This is amazing. love it.

[@ancientone5903]

If Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project ever got re-released for the Super Nintendo back in the day, I have no doubt this track would sound just like what you brought up. Now if only we could make an arcade cabinet and play it all while eating pizza =)

[@ps-lover8380]

Nice remix I love this game

[@FCEngine]

Bucky O Hare ost in TMNT4 instruments would be absolute perfection

[@magoid]

One thing about Konami on the NES, is that they didn't care one damn bit about sprite flickering. Konami developers: "If the CPU can barely handle 5 enemies on the screen, I'm putting 5 enemies on the screen". NES PPU: "hey, I don't agree with that..."

[@NintendoComplete]

Oh man, I know right? Like Parodius. Who cares if it often runs at half-speed? :D Hahaha. But really, I never minded that much. Their games were impressive, especially when they were clearly pushing past what the NES could actually do.

[@magoid]

@@NintendoComplete Indeed. Even today we have titles with slowdowns, on obscenely powerful consoles and PCs.

[@TonyKanameKuran]

Two thumbs up! I love it!!!!

[@NintendoComplete]

Thanks! :)

[@TonyKanameKuran]

The next track I wish for is "Bridge of Danger" from TMNT III: The Manhattan Project!

[@ZEKESPILLEDINKMUSIC]

Who wants to see the Ninja Turtles games on Nintendo Switch Online? Technically, Nintendo CAN do it, because they have licensed games included in the service.

[@NintendoComplete]

I'd love to see that, but doesn't Activision still have the license? :(

[@christopherthibeault7502]

@@NintendoComplete Konami developed the Gen-One & Early Comic games. This means, if Konami makes a case, Activision might cry foul. However, Activision handled the later TMNT games if memory serves. They could do those if they wanted no problem, but the Konami era trumps all. Activision also holds the licenses or IP for the Monolith-Produced "No One Lives Forever" games, those Austin Powers-inspired retro spy FPS games, and sits on them. My suggestion, since we're on the high seas anyway....

[@Doorhenge]

ｲu尺ｲﾚ乇 ｱow乇尺 ... is the name of this song. How about the city level from the arcade game now?

[@ryuken.shimurasarutobi5616]

my favorite nes turtles game

[@YukesVonFaust]

SPC When, this is rad!

[@NintendoComplete]

It's now linked in the description

[@_aitchfactor188]

Hey, this treble boosting works out pretty well, particularly with making that slap bass sound really crisp. What sample rate are you playing the snare drum at? Generally, if that's not played at a high sample rate (>24khz) then even with treble boosting, the whole song will sound muffled. You might also want to rerecord the snare from the arcade games, instead of (presumably) using the existing SNES ports' snare. If the ARAM is being stretched really thin on this one, you'll probably want to loop a small part of the snare and use the volume envelope to approximate the rest. On that note, it'd be great if you could make an .spc or even an .IT file available - I love tinkering with and looking inside things to improve my understanding of how things work, and I think there's a lot I can learn from you in that regard.

[@NintendoComplete]

I've noticed with drums too. I usually try to prioritize the quality of the snare over other samples. Iirc the snare sample here is being played somewhere around 30-32Khz. I'll have to check. And sure, sometime else requested it too. I'll post a link to the .spc

[@_aitchfactor188]

@@NintendoComplete the other thing is that even if you play your snare at ~30khz, it’s pointless if the sample doesn’t actually have much frequency content that makes use of that high end. You might like to run a frequency analysis (Audacity can do this for you in Tools > Analyse) on your samples to make sure you’re getting the most out of them.

[@_aitchfactor188]

Alright, so, now that I've taken a look at the .spc, here are a few insights - - The kick drum is over 10k samples long, and played at >67khz? Impressive, but maybe a bit overkill - in theory you'll never need to play any fixed pitch samples (like drums) at over 32khz, especially if you filter them to compensate for the high end. There also seems to be about a thousand completely zeroed samples at the end, which looks like it's taking up space that could be used for something else. - In a similar vein, does the orchestra hit really need to be 16k samples long? Especially since in the song it's frequently faded out before the sample ends. It's definitely loopable, particularly if you're using OpenMPT, and/or you could certainly get away with just lopping off a few thousand samples off the end and letting the echo hide the seams. - If you do one or the other of these then I'm sure you'd have the space to upsample the "Hey!" sample a bit. - Looks like the snare sample was originally low-passed at around 26khz, which is pretty unfortunate, especially since (as I've since realised :p) the arcade snare sample sounds completely different. - You can afford to go a bit further with the treble boosting, even if it's at the expense of overall volume. BRR (the snes's native sample format) conversion tools like BRRtools and wav2brr have this functionality built in, although I recommend that you convert some samples and use these only as as reference, since the output will be reduced in quality from converting to BRR multiple times.

[@NintendoComplete]

@@_aitchfactor188 Wow, I had no idea you were this interested. Okay, so I encoded the bass drum sample that way because the quality of the rhythm instruments, like we were saying about snares before, is pretty key. Even though the SNES outputs at 32Khz max, the Nyquist limit does play a role. The higher quality the sample, the more data there is to use when downsampling to the output rate. (Sorta like when supersampling graphics in games, a 1080p downscale from a 4k source generally looks much better than a natively rendered 1080p picture, despite the end resolution being the same.) I had a fair amount of space left over, so having the sample that size wasn't a problem. The same with the synthed orchestra hits, I could have cut it short and given it a looped fade, but I didn't need to. I preferred to keep the quality so high because it draws so much attention to itself. As for TMNT's arcade samples, I usually don't like to use them because they don't compress very efficiently. They're all 8-bit, and they aren't great quality (I seem to remember them being around 11Khz?). That's why I used the SNES game's snare, and it's also why the voice sample is notably more muffled than the rest of the sounds. The zeroed outsamples are just padding, iirc. SPCs are full snapshots of the APU's memory, so they are supposed to be 64k.

[@Nevidimka0]

👍👍👍👍👍👍👍

[@JMein13074]

Any chance of a Theme of Half-Shell/Star Base medley remix?

[@NintendoComplete]

Aren't those pretty much the same song? Iirc they also used the Super Shredder theme in TMNT3.

[@JMein13074]

@@NintendoComplete With subtle differences. It would be like RushJet1's Mega Man 1987 stage compositions.

[@squaramargopraxediz]

This music is Great Very Good Style F-zero X N64 or style Snes Capcom X-Men Mutant Apocalypse

[@thecunninlynguist]

Totally tubular

[@Dorian_Scott]

Cowabunga, Dudes! 🤟

[@NintendoComplete]

Sweet, I loved to hate that level in Mario World.

[@Dorian_Scott]

It's been *so* long since I've played it back in 1990, but if I remember correctly, the Japanese version of *_"Super Mario World"_* didn't have these *VERY* dated slang words to name every level in the *_"Special World"_* . _Past Me_ was rather confused by this decision of *_"Nintendo of America's"_* .

[@林輝雄-u7x]

賴志偉🏑💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💶💵💵💴💷💷💴💴💵💵💶💷💴💵💵💶💷💴💴💵💵💷💴💴💵💵💶💶💷💷💵💰💰💰💰

[@NintendoComplete]

I feel like I'm back as president at Ichiban Holdings with those fat cash stacks.

[@thelastofitskind3034]

I hated that stage lol