MindWanderer

With the move to ThaSauce, there won't be any more compilation downloads. Also Season 3 is only halfway through.

Hm, so they're in formats for Logic, Kontakt, Ableton Live, and Reason. I know the free version of Kontakt can only play free samples for a limited time. Are any of the others compatible with any generic VST samplers?

Yeah, I personally think it's unfortunate that the OCR panel hates fakey instruments so much. It seems like everything has to be really close to live performance quality, or so synthetic it doesn't resemble a real instrument at all. There are a few exceptions where one low-fi instrument is accepted as an aesthetic choice, usually among a bunch of synths, but otherwise it doesn't seem like 4th-5th generation-esque sounds can get through. I also like those a lot. They're close enough to real instruments to convey intent and capture the feel of a genre, and I don't find them unpleasant to listen to at all.

It was on Wednesday night. Yesterday night was fine, though--though then, too, most were Japanese. From the YouTube videos I've seen, they mostly seem to be Japanese all the time. Very interesting experience, I had a lot of fun. For the first hour and a half, everyone kind of sucked--there were level 17+ players with scores below 500, and I was consistently the top scorer. One particular match had me at level 3 and three other players level 7 and below, the opponents were all level 15-20, and we won by a wide margin. I hope the level 20 players getting creamed by a bunch of noobs found it as amusing as I did. Then at about 11:30, the pros apparently showed up. There was a constant stream of me and my allies respawning over and over again, and my scores dropped by 75%. It was horrible. Very much looking forward to playing again tonight. Just a couple more fights and I can get the much-touted Aerospray!

Just finished the campaign mode last night (special midnight bulletin from Callie and Marie!), diving into multiplayer tonight or tomorrow. First time doing online multiplayer anything, so we'll see how that goes.... Edit: Apparently 11 PM PDT on a weeknight is not a good time for matchmaking, at least not for a game marketed toward a younger crowd. I may not be able to play this game as much as I thought.

Soundfonts aren't the most typical way to do 8-bit and 16-bit sounds, although there are some 16-bit soundfonts out there. SetzerSPC comes to mind. For SNES sounds, C700 is a great way to go. You can load .spc files into it and emulate the exact sounds used by the game and track you load. They may lack a few of the properties of the source (e.g. reverb) but they'll get you 95% of the way there. For NES, there are quite a few--NES VST, Magical 8-bit Plug, and NES Pulse are my go-to VSTi's. I'm not sure if you meant to include the Commodore 64, but Bleep' and Base65 are good there. I'm not as familiar with Genesis chip emulators, though there are a few of them you can find easily enough, so I'll let others give you advice about those. There are also some generic synths that cover chiptune sounds really well. TAL-Noisemaker and Synth1 come to mind right away, but pretty much any softsynth will be able to do squares, pulses, and triangles.

For Smash, I recommend either Smash 64 (where it all started) or Melee (for which he took time off being a manager to debug himself). His role in Brawl and Smash 4 wasn't as definitive, IMO. http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/iwata-nintendo-retrospective/

I'll take the bullet and say that I don't actually know what you mean by this. As far as I know, panning far left means that 100% of the sound is coming out of the left speaker, vice-versa for right, and centering means that the volume is split 50/50 between both. I imagine that what bluelighter did was simply copy the same track twice, each one hard panned to opposite sides, and then reduced the volume by half to compensate. Which would have the exact same sound as centering it in the first place. The only thing I can imagine you mean is that the two speakers should be different somehow--different takes of a live instrument, different samples in a round-robin, microvariations in timing or velocity, subtle differences in FX, etc. Since I've heard this criticism before, I imagine I'm totally wrong about my understanding and would appreciate correction.

You should still do it. It seems like the copyright trolls tend to win these disputes for some bizarre reason, but the more complaints against a particular troll, the more likely YouTube will figure it out. Do it for the greater good.

Something from Pokemon G/S that plays in Kanto would be called for, and apparently Smash Melee was on the verge of cancellation due to massive bugginess until he stepped in, so that too.

How about the "Zero Space/Cyber Maze" stages of X5? They're the equivalent of the Sigma Fortress, gameplay-wise. And the final stage is pretty badass. Holding out hope for this one for Round 10 (at least, as an option).

Nice energy level, lots of fun. It's pretty heavily loaded on the high end, lacking in mids. First section, an almost exact cover, repeats verbatim, then a nice original section, then another verbatim repetition. Gotta switch that up a little more. The key-changed variant at the end is very cool, but that kind of thing needs to happen earlier and more. Could use some stereo separation, the whole thing is lined up almost straight down the middle.

If you liked this (and how could you not), Sam is Kickstarting a Chrono Trigger album with some stretch goals that include more remixes from Chrono Cross, Crystalis, and Xenogears (so far!).

On the internet, angry negative people will always be louder than happy positive people, at least for a very long time. But I do think Nintendo is still trying to work out the online/couch compromise. They've been the kings of the couch since the N64, but online is increasingly important, and they have to do less trailblazing--it's not the cowboy days of online multiplayer, when everything worked badly if at all. Unless you're EA (half the time) or Ubisoft (all the time), anyway. Take Mario Kart. They had a golden opportunity to do couch multiplayer right, with one person on a fullscreen tablet, and one on a fullscreen TV or two on a split-screen TV. Instead, even the tablet is split-screen, which is nonsense. At least you can have two local players together in an online game. Or Splatoon. Why is there no split-screen or dual-screen local/online play? That would be a ton of fun. The teleport feature would have to be different, so there might need to be a special game mode for this, but still. Part of the problem seems to be that their games either ignore the tablet controller altogether, or make too much use of it. None seem to make it just "useful."

Backstory: A wushu team I'm affiliated with is going to be doing a performance next year in which one of the sequences is going to be based on King of Fighters. I wasn't familiar with the series at all, but they usually do anime stuff, so I leapt on the the chance to do a game remix for them and started doing my research. And OH MY GOD King of Fighters 2002 Unlimited Match has one hell of a soundtrack! It's mostly updates/arrangements of songs that appeared earlier in the series, but they've all been improved to the n'th degree. The new songs are similarly amazing. I can't believe I've never encountered this soundtrack before and it's downright criminal that it's not on OCR. I'm not asking for help with the fight sequence--that's going to be a medley that encompasses several games and won't really be OCR-appropriate (though I may rework some parts of it later on for OCR--maybe even for this, time permitting). But there should be an album for this game and I would like to make it happen. Anyone with me?

Hm... not a whole lot of responses. I'll leave this thread open in case it hits critical mass at some point, but I'm not optimistic. Swinging over to another idea....

Yeah, I've done VII and VIII that way, and it's fine. It's just IX, and just disk 2 to 3 (1 to 2 is fine).

I'm sure Meteo is on top of this, but a few key points: If it's only going to live in one physical cabinet which will never be sold for profit, you can really do whatever you like. Even if the press covers it, you're not distributing it. If you do decide to distribute it, a lot depends on the company who made the original music. Square Enix will tear you a new one if you sample their stuff for any reason, or cover their stuff for money without licensing. Capcom is generally OK with sampling in a free distribution and is easy to work with in general. It sounds like you don't really want the original music, but rather the general feel of it--timbre and arrangement style, much like metaphist's fake Mega Man X soundtrack. In which case, hitting up OCR is a great idea. In fact, hitting up metaphist directly might not be a bad idea if Meteo doesn't take the whole thing on himself. There are probably many folks here who'd like to contribute, on the condition that the release gets wider distribution than one physical cabinet.

Magnus Shrike stage is missing from the YouTube playlist. Is it just me, or does the music sound just a little less full than the original soundtracks? It's hard for me to put my finger on--it just seems like there's a little bit less going on. For instance, the intro stage only seems to kick into full gear when the pad comes in at 1:38. Edit: Ok, it was really just a few of the early tracks I felt that way about. Mostly it's just really damn good. At least as good as X2 and X3. I wish there were an actual fan game to go along with the soundtrack.

If you were able to complete FFIX on Mednafen, then yes, it's more accurate. The PS3 (and PS2) crash on the change from disk 2 to disk 3, I learned to my great frustration. (I understand the PS3 does work with virtual disks, just not with physical ones.) I'd personally be looking for something that supports physical disks. Ripping my entire collection of PS1 games is a task I'd rather avoid.

Which emulator? I haven't tried emulation since Bleem was the only way to go, but it's getting increasingly important and useful to identify ones that actually work.

RWS is on a short hiatus, but MnP's and PRC's absences from the calendar appear to be oversights.

Yeah, M 'n' P's 2 week remixing time is pretty generous considering the amount of work it requires. Otherwise, there isn't really anything that offers more than 2 weeks. Tournaments usually give just one week. Then there's always the One-Hour Compo.

Thanks! That makes it easier. ... but, actually, listening to it again, it's basically just the piano that I object to again.

Bah. Well, thanks anyway. Oh, it contrasts all right. I found it jarring. I can't figure out how to get exact times in tindeck.