Strange happening in Ocarina of Time

[JohnStacy]

I'm not really much of a gamer anymore, as I don't really keep up with playing new games, and haven't for quite a few years.  I watch people play them and am always on the lookout for new game music, but I just don't play that much anymore.  Occasionally, however, I play through older games I have and still get enjoyment out of them.  I love the older games, and nostalgia plays a key role in that enjoyment.  I even have a portable SNES to play on the bus when on tour.

My n64 is from around 1999 or 2000, and the copy of Ocarina of Time is from around that time too.  I know they're getting old and worn down, partially because I have lived in West Texas my whole life and if you've ever lived there you know that you accumulate an inch of dust or dirt a week even if you actively clean the place because of all the cotton fields and otherwise open expanses of dirt everywhere in this part of the state.  I have to get the cart positioned just right in the slot to get the game to run, and the game will randomly crash during normal gameplay.  Recently, I've cleaned everything extensively, and it runs better than it has in years.

The reason for this post is a strange happening that has started.  The music doesn't sound right.  It's not distorted or jumbled, so it isn't the standard issues I'm used to hearing about.  What happens is some instruments are muted.  What instruments are muted is random, but it's consistent for each track.  For example, one of the string ensemble tracks in Hyrule Field is muted every time.  As a result, there is no melody in a few sections of that track, and in one section, there's just horns holding whole notes with no melody over it.  Hyrule field consistently plays back like this now.  In the fire temple, the background music is silent a lot of the time.  I am playing a 1.2 cart, so it doesn't have the Arabic chanting that was present in earlier versions, rather the generic choir ahhs.  However, the percussion is mostly absent.  There are quite a few tracks that have been affected, but I haven't finished this playthrough so I don't know what all has been affected yet.

I'm not really worried about the gameplay, or even if the game will stop working for good soon, I just find it weird that this thing happens.  Maybe there's a bit of ROM corruption or a damaged pin, but beyond that, I'm at a loss as to what actually technically is going wrong here.

[Rozovian]

Probably one particular note track missing. I can produce similar effects, mute individual note tracks, though I've never tried with n64 music, in Audio Overload playing nes or snes music. On the snes, tracks aren't bound to a particular instrument, so there could be notes for multiple instruments on the same track. If that track was muted, those things obviously don't play. My guess is that this is what's causing your missing percussion and occasional string notes.

[MindWanderer]

Have you tried other games?  It would make more sense for the hardware to be damaged than the software on a ROM corrupted, specifically in such a specific way.

[JohnStacy]

It only happens on Ocarina of Time.  I just started a playthough of Majora's Mask, and it works just fine.  All of the music is normal there, including some of the shared tracks.  After finishing Ocarina this time around, there were quite a few tracks affected, the most notable being the short one that plays when you interact with the master sword in the temple of time.  I can attempt to post videos showing it later.

I can't really think of anything I've done that could have muted things, I haven't used the cart for anything other than normal gameplay (except for a short period where I did a little bit of crooked cart a long time ago.)  I have interacted with SPC music to mute tracks and play with it and whatnot, but nothing with n64 music.

Other games I've tried that work fine are Paper Mario, Megaman 64, Yoshi Story and Pokemon Snap, which all work fine.