I’ve been on a NES music kick this past week. As such, I’ve been grabbing .NSF music files, which are created by directly ripping the song info from NES ROMs and loading them into a specialized MIDI program to play.
A lot of these old games also store interesting sounds in the same manner as music, for example: a lot of tracks on Zanac are actually just short explosions, or power-up sounds.
But when I started listening to River City Ransom, one of my all time favorite games, I noticed that I didn’t recognize about half of the tracks.
I’ve played this game through hundreds of times, and I was really confused. Then, I hear the Double Dragon theme come out of the file! Tecmo published both DD and RR, so I suppose it’s not that shocking, but I’m really intrigued by how many songs were seemingly embedded into this game without them ever being used. There are, by my rough count, 5 full songs, some very elaborate, that aren’t used in the game. I’ve heard one or two tracks like that on other games, but usually they’re short, and they’re never from other games.
Anyone know about this?
For your reference, you can snag a .NSF player here:
http://www.zophar.net/utilities/nsf.html
and the .NSF files here:
http://www.zophar.net/download.php?file=nsf/riverc~1.zip
Double Dragon is track 10