About

So how in the heck did I come up with the idea of 5.1 surround NES music? As you probably know, the NES has mono sound.

I’ve had an interest in video game music pretty much since I got my NES back in 1992. Within a couple of years or so, I was recording the music to listen to outside of the game. Back then all I had to work with was a cassette deck, but I recorded the music from several games. This was probably around 1994 or so.

In 1999, I got my first PC. It didn’t take me long to discover the Line In jack on the sound card along with some audio editing software that came with the sound card. Naturally, a light turned on, and I started recording video game music on my computer. NES emulators were getting popular around this time and the NSF format was also taking off. However, the NSF players at the time didn’t sound that great to me. So I stuck with recording NES music directly from the system. At the time, I had a Dolby Pro Logic surround receiver, and had an interest in being able to play NES music through all the speakers. The receiver didn’t have an all-channel stereo mode, so you had to use Pro Logic or the 5-D Theater mode (Pioneer’s own surround technology). However, mono sources only play through the center channel. I discovered the technique of phase shifting (offsetting one channel by a very small amount) which allowed the music to play through all 5 speakers in these modes.

A few years later, I discovered the Festalon NSF player and was impressed with how good it sounded. With its ability to isolate sound channels, I could apply separate filters to each channel, which is something I couldn’t do when recording directly from the NES. Thus, my soundtracking techniques continued to advance. I made my first soundtrack this way in 2004.

A few years later, I stumbled across the technique of phase inversion (inverting the waveform of one channel) which allows sounds to be sent specifically to the rear channels in Pro Logic or Pro Logic II. I applied this technique, which allowed me to add front-to-back separation to NES music, and created my first soundtrack this way in 2007. This was the first time my soundtracks had a true surround sound element to them. Of course, Pro Logic/Pro Logic II creates surround sound from a stereo source, so it isn’t going to be as good as discrete multi-channel, but it is surprisingly good for what it is.

In 2009, I got my first DVD-Audio player. This was the first time I had actually heard lossless multi-channel music. Prior to that, I had only heard Dolby Digital 5.1 music, which was pretty cool, but at the same time it was a bit of a trade off (surround sound at the expense of some quality). Upon hearing the lossless multi-channel music, I knew I had to find a way to incorporate that into my soundtracks.

I downloaded the source code to the Festalon NSF player and started making modifications to it, first giving it 24-bit output. I had DVD-Audio in mind as a release format from the beginning, which supports 24-bit/96 kHz resolution for 5.1 content. I wanted to take full advantage of the format. This eventually led to my first discrete multi-channel soundtrack in 2010, which was Mega Man 3. It took a huge amount of work to make that soundtrack, so I knew that if I was going to be able to make any more, something had to change. While working on the soundtrack, I had determined that it was desirable to have the percussion instruments positioned separately, but of course with NES music the percussion is generally all on one channel, or possibly two if it utilizes the PCM channel for percussion. I had to manually separate all the percussion instruments into separate files to allow them to be positioned independently. This involved going through one note at a time, which can be extremely tedious, even if you have all your shortcuts configured in your audio editor.

I went back to work coding on the NSF player and gave it the ability to automatically separate notes into different files based on the frequency of the notes. It took a lot of work to get the plugin to do what I needed it to do, but in the end it helped out tremendously. Not only did it make the job easier, but I can get even better sound quality now. Hopefully I will be able to continue cranking out 5.1 NES soundtracks for a while. I hope you enjoy the music!

-Metal Man
July 10, 2011