I was originally going to base this Byte Sized on sequels and how they could be good things instead of bad things, but other events conspired to steal my attention, and for this installment, I'll bore you with a little history and a query afterward.

For the better part of twelve years now I have recorded game music in some form or another, from Commodore 64 and NES all the way up to the Playstation. At first it was with generic audiotapes and the microphone of a cheap radio, then some time after, a stereo system with audio lines run directly into it from a game system, followed by digital recordings onto the computer. A couple years I ago, I burned my first audio CD (side note: it was Megaman X4) and figured that would be as cool as it ever got.

Yesterday I discovered something that threatened to topple the nifty factor of recording and burning my own digital music. It was very simple, really. Just a plug-in add-on for WinAmp that allowed someone to play some new kinds of files. The cool bit was that these files were sound files pulled from NES, SNES and Genesis cartridges, basically handing you a complete sound test of any game the sound file has been pulled from. As a lover of game music, I was in heaven. Within minutes I was listening to favorite pieces from Cobra Triangle, Willow, Double Dragon, Rygar and several others.

Without a doubt the best part of this are the pieces of music which would be impossible to record otherwise. Anyone who has played Gyruss, on the NES for instance, knows of the unavoidable sound effects which pop up therein. Or the escape sequence of Metroid which contains that annoying beeping siren throughout all the music. These and more can be circumvented completely with this handy miracle of science.

But all is not paradise. The emulation of these musics is not perfect, there is a tempo falter here or a note which doesn't sound exactly on, there. These are small prices to pay, but they do indeed give pause to the purist in me. After a short period of thought, I decided that the lure of otherwise unobtainable music was too great to pass up, so, some of these will be finding their way onto the radio station soon, and I'm quite tempted to continue making NES music CDs for myself, now that their recording time is a mere fraction of what it was before.

For those interested in this wonder of technology, there are probably several copies around, but the site I got it from is here. Look for NSF, SPC and GYM players. They also have a wide selection of NES games there. Download a few favorites and relive some memories today.