Whilst creating Cannonball, I uncovered a large section of unused YM2151 music data in the Z80 program code. Initially, I was excited - could this be an unreleased Hiroshi Kawaguchi classic?
Unfortunately, after hacking the code to play the data it sounded like garbage. I wasn't sure if this was a problem with MAME's emulation, so I asked Alex of the OutRun bootloader project to play the sound on hardware. He sent me the results, which you can download here as an MP3.
It still sounded wrong, so at this stage I stopped investigating. It wasn't until later that night when I randomly happened to be playing the Space Harrier soundtrack on vinyl, that I came across the following composition:
I wonder if this is the Space Harrier Wiki Jumbo track embedded, but playing incorrectly due to other modifications to the sound code? It's a shame, because otherwise we could have hacked OutRun to have an additional tune. Perhaps it's still possible with some additional work...
This maybe isn't a big surprise, we've already uncovered other segments of Space Harrier in the OutRun code.
Cannonball news - I'm implementing a nice front-end menu, with lots of cool configuration options. Expect a new version after Christmas.
1 comment:
Nice menu. Next version is going to be huge again :).
Hiscore saving, configurable control, sound and video.. Very nice !
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