A quick update on what’s been happening lately

Hello everyone and sorry for the long silence.
We’ve been hard at work with different groups on several things concerning our project (among many other aspects of videogame music preservation) and we’ve all been working towards something very big and important which will be announced in due time.
 
Meanwhile, I’ve added a disclaimer to our Release page: as we’ve been knowing for quite some time, all the “pre-remaster” releases have inaccuracies in their speed (and, as a consequence, their pitch) due to us using a PAL Mega Drive, despite the 60hz switch and crystal swap.
All the releases affected have been marked as such.
 
This was long due and we came to a point where we were forced to specify this because while even for the serious listener a 0.951% speed difference will probably go unnoticed, on the other hand our releases have been used for critical work (emulators, FPGA implementation, etc.) where even less than a 1% difference in speed has a huge impact.
 
We want to sincerely apologize to all the people who’ve relied on our releases and now have to double check their work to make sure that they were using either a Remaster or post-remaster release (all those after 3/11/2014 are very close to cycle accurate, with a discrepancy in speed of 0,00479% – newer ones will be cycle accurate).
We’ve been going through very big changes during those 8 years (yes, it’s been that long) and we’ve accumulated an incredibe amount of knowledge, but there’s always something new to learn and discover and now we’re going back to drawing board, looking at how we rip and record games from the Mega Drive, because we can’t afford to make any more mistakes and must make sure that our work is not only done through the best audio equipment possible, but is also done rigorously, making sure that all ends meet.
This means we’re re-hauling most of our own workflow and will make sure to be as transparent as possible as to what we’re doing and how we’re doing it so that people know exactly what they’re getting.
All releases are now on hold until we’ve untangled the mess and come up with something we know for sure that is completely accurate (or accurate enough that the differences are so small as to be negligible).
Thanks to all of you who’ve been following us and using our work and to all the fantastic people we’ve had the pleasure of working with so far.
We’ll be back with very substantial updates (hopefully) soon.

EX-Ranza / Ranger-X released!

Click on the image to go to the download page

 

Katcho is back with another big release: EX-Ranza, known outside of Japan as Ranger-X!

This is quite a big release and with 4 bonus tracks which are unused during normal gameplay.

Also, this marks an important milestone in our project as this is the first release made using the new and improved VGM Player, courtesy of the immensely talented Deadfish Shitware.
We’ve already discussed what’s changed from the previous version but the two big things, to put it short are:

1 – The old VGM Player’s speed was off by 0,00479%. Yes, that’s a ridiculously small amount and I’d dare anyone telling the difference, but there it is. Now we have perfect timing down to each cycle.
2 – We’re now able to completely disable video circuitry while recording, thus reducing noise to an imperceptible amount.

Katcho himself reported that he really couldn’t tell a difference from our previous VGM Player, which should tell you a lot about how we’re splitting hairs here, but as people have been using our releases to improve their own work (mainly emulation – including FPGAs) we now take it upon ourselves to provide the best quality and most accurate rips of Mega Drive material.

I hope I’ll have some time in the near future to write a small article about a recent discovery which has put us even closer to our ultimate goal.
A small hint: in a previous article, where we talked about MDFourier, we said how we made a complete shot in the dark by choosing a particular Mega Drive revision along with a fix for its output stage, hoping that it would come close to what a developer kit would sound like. Well, we have now one evidence that we might have done just the right choice.

Thanks to Katcho for another contribution and all of you for following us and stay tuned for more information!

Whip Rush released!

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Get ready for another contribution from Richard Mixin: Whip Rush!

With this release we’ve officially run out of contributions for now. I know Richard is working on others but those might take some time before they’re ready.

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking about another way of contributing to the project so that we can get back archiving music ourselves with a bit of help from our community.

I’ll flesh this idea out in the following days and make a proper post to let you know how you can help out!

If you’re interested in contributing and you feel confident in your audio knowledge and recording equipment, we’re always accepting new contributions!
Just make sure to adhere to our guidelines and you’re good to go!

See you soon!

Warsong released!

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Albeit with a little delay here goes this week’s new release from our contributor, Richard Mixin!

His release include even 3 bonus tracks which look like to be unused during normal gameplay, it’s great to have them included!

Let me take the opportunity to remember to all of our contributors that while including beta/unused tracks is not required, it is absolutely welcome!

I’m also thinking about ways to improve my own workflow and I may need in the future some collaborators which, similar to our contributors, will help us out in archiving Mega Drive’s soundtracks, but won’t require any technical knowledge about recording and all that scary stuff in our terrible awful incomprehensible (vastly) improvable guidelines.

So stay tuned, hopefully I’ll soon make my mind up and let you know about other ways to contribute to our goal!

Target Earth released!

Click on the image to go to the download page

 

Ladies and gentlemen we’re back!

Today we’re delighted to share yet another contribution from Richard Mixin: Target Earth.

As always, we’re going to be back here next week with another release from our contributors, so stay tuned!

Sword of Vermilion released!

Click on the image to go to the download page

 

And we’re back with another community release, courtesy again of Richard Mixin who releases a HUGE soundtrack made of 33 tracks! I’m not sure if this is the biggest release we ever had (without counting Sonic 3 & Knuckles – that would be cheating, that’s two games in one!), but it’s definitely a massive one!

Thanks again to Richard for all the contributions done so far. We have more for you coming, so stay tuned for the next week’s release!

P.S.: one of our followers have asked us if we could do arcade releases.
Short answer: yes! We can and it’s even easier than ripping Mega Drive games.
I have SNK Neo-Geo, Capcom CPS1, Capcom CPS2 and SEGA System16B, so it’s definitely a possibility in the future, but with 6+ years old requests in the forums I don’t feel comfortable recording new stuff.
We’ll see!