Author: Peter Swimm

By now many of you have seen of played Mega Man 9. The game, an incredibly hard and frustrating affair also has a surprisingly accurate sounding soundtrack.  The Games composer, Ippo Yamda discussed how the game was composed in a recent article:

Strictly speaking the soundtrack of Mega Man 9 is not NES music, but to its very core it has been created in the spirit of NES music. We made use of a program that closely resembles the console’s sound source, producing very similar waveforms, and thereby were able to make music tracks that sound just like the original. In the days of Mega Man 1-6, you were challenged to manipulate the audio signals produced by the sound card within the range designated by the restrictions of the hardware. Naturally in making this game we had no hardware restrictions, but we stuck to the formula of three pulse wave channels and one noise channel. Within this framework we freely went about composing music.

Helpful, but still pretty vague. The gang over at the Famitracker forums debated it further.
(more…)