Streets of Rage - Fighting In The Street (TurboGrafx-16 Chiptune Cover)

[FraGMarE]

Here's the finished product guys.  My very first chiptune and it's a cover of Yuzo Koshiro's excellent Fighting In The Street (Stage 1) of Streets of Rage.    I think I could probably play with the instruments some more, but I'm calling it done for now.  I might come back later and make some changes, but I want to cover something else next. ;)

Full Chiptune Mix on SoundCloud

Streets of Rage - Fighting In The Street (TurboGrafx-16 Cover) ROM file download

[SmokeMonster]

Sounds pretty nice! Feels like it would fit right at home in a shoot 'em up now

[Arjak]

 

Absolutely gorgeous. Sounds very close to the original Genesis version and perfectly captures the spirit thereof. I recently attempted to make my first chiptune; a version of Ys II's Termination for Genesis, but it didn't turn out nearly as well as yours. Kudos!

[Michirin9801]

I already commented on the Deflemask forum, but I might as well comment here too, and yeah, it's really impressive, especially for a first-timer, great job mate!
I'm looking forward to seeing more from you ^^

[DeshDildo]

This is awesome!  I am a huge SOR fan so you're combining some of my favorite things.  Now someone use this as inspiration to port any iteration of Streets of Rage to TG/PCE.

[TurboXray]

SOR resized for PCE res would work out pretty decent:

pcedev.net/pics/SOR_exm_1.png

[FraGMarE]

Slightly revised and remixed version uploaded at the same link.  The leads won't blow you out of your chair now, and i fixed a nasty pitch issue in the harmony.  Also gave the bassline more punch, turned up the samples a notch, some other tweaks and... presto

^{♫ https://soundcloud.com/user-716572978/streets-of-rage-fighting-in-the-street-turbografx-16-chiptune-cover}

[FraGMarE]

SOR resized for PCE res would work out pretty decent:

Lol why resize it?  Just go 1:1-ish and use 336x224 mode.  ;)



That's how IREM rolled haha

[ccovell]

Sounds great!!

[FraGMarE]

As promised, here is the "in-game" mix, using only 5 channels and 8Khz samples.  I was going to do 7Khz, but Deflemask doesn't go that low heh... not much difference between 7k-8k, so you'll get a good idea for how it would sound.  Lacks a little punch and depth of the full chiptune version, but still gets the point across quite well.

^{♫ https://soundcloud.com/user-716572978/streets-of-rage-fighting-in-the-street-turbografx-16-in-game-mix}

[Michirin9801]

As promised, here is the "in-game" mix, using only 5 channels and 8Khz samples.  I was going to do 7Khz, but Deflemask doesn't go that low heh... not much difference between 7k-8k, so you'll get a good idea for how it would sound.  Lacks a little punch and depth of the full chiptune version, but still gets the point across quite well.

^{♫ https://soundcloud.com/user-716572978/streets-of-rage-fighting-in-the-street-turbografx-16-in-game-mix}

You know, you don't really have to use only 5 channels if you don't want to, if you arrange the song in a
clever way, and by clever way I mean put all of the least important stuff on channel 5 (since you're using channel 6 to play the drums) and just cram as much of the song as possible on channels 1 through 4 leaving channel 5 free as much as possible you can just cut out whatever's playing on channel 5 to play sound effects and then resume playing regular music notes on it when sound effects aren't being played!

That's how I arrange my music on deflemask, I'm always mindful of the possibility of sound effects, even when the song is never gonna be used in a real game, I generally put the bass on channel 1 and the drums on channel 6 and everything else in between...
For example, I can put the lead melody on channel 2, play a power chord on channels 3 and 4, and use channel 5 as just a delay/reverb effect for the lead, that way when I cut out channel 5 for SFX I don't lose any detail in the composition, just some minor effect that wouldn't even be noticed when there's a punch sound effect or an explosion going on!
And if you really need to have a whole lot of stuff playing at once, you put the quietest or more subtle parts of the song on channel 5, you know, the parts that would hardly be heard when a sound effect plays!

Just giving you a few tips, but the song still sounds great even with only 5 channels ^^

[FraGMarE]

As promised, here is the "in-game" mix, using only 5 channels and 8Khz samples.  I was going to do 7Khz, but Deflemask doesn't go that low heh... not much difference between 7k-8k, so you'll get a good idea for how it would sound.  Lacks a little punch and depth of the full chiptune version, but still gets the point across quite well.  And channel5 does not use any noise hits, so it could easily just be copy pasta'd over to channel 3, leaving channel 5 open for sound effects (and noise effects).

^{♫ https://soundcloud.com/user-716572978/streets-of-rage-fighting-in-the-street-turbografx-16-in-game-mix}

You know, you don't really have to use only 5 channels if you don't want to, if you arrange the song in a
clever way, and by clever way I mean put all of the least important stuff on channel 5 (since you're using channel 6 to play the drums) and just cram as much of the song as possible on channels 1 through 4 leaving channel 5 free as much as possible you can just cut out whatever's playing on channel 5 to play sound effects and then resume playing regular music notes on it when sound effects aren't being played!

That's how I arrange my music on deflemask, I'm always mindful of the possibility of sound effects, even when the song is never gonna be used in a real game, I generally put the bass on channel 1 and the drums on channel 6 and everything else in between...
For example, I can put the lead melody on channel 2, play a power chord on channels 3 and 4, and use channel 5 as just a delay/reverb effect for the lead, that way when I cut out channel 5 for SFX I don't lose any detail in the composition, just some minor effect that wouldn't even be noticed when there's a punch sound effect or an explosion going on!
And if you really need to have a whole lot of stuff playing at once, you put the quietest or more subtle parts of the song on channel 5, you know, the parts that would hardly be heard when a sound effect plays!

Just giving you a few tips, but the song still sounds great even with only 5 channels ^^

Yea, I was definitely mindful of that from the beginning.  I wanted to make both a 6 channel mix and a 5 channel "programmer friendly" mix.  As I went along dissecting Yuzo's music, mapping out the full mix, i was noticing he was putting a lot of dead space and other filler stuff on channel3... sure enough, it's like Yuzo already did the work for me as far as putting all the "discardable" stuff on a single channel.  It's like he already knew 

As an aside, if you want to take a journey inside a musical madman's mind, go dissect Yuzo's original Genesis track sometime, channel by channel.  That guy was doing some insanity haha

[Michirin9801]

As an aside, if you want to take a journey inside a musical madman's mind, go dissect Yuzo's original Genesis track sometime, channel by channel.  That guy was doing some insanity haha

I would if I were more of a fan, but IMHO the SoR soundtracks are Master Yuzo's weakest works >w>
I much prefer the likes of Etrian Odyssey, the Ys games, Act Raiser (which I believe to be his masterpiece), Revenge of Shinobi and even some of his obscure PC-88 stuff, but it's not like I don't like the SoR soundtracks either, they're overall pretty good (except for 3 which is a bloody mess) but far from my favourite soundtracks from him, for the system and from the genre...
But hey, opinions and all, right?

[ParanoiaDragon]

I've never been much of a fan of the Genesis soundchip, but felt that if anyone could make it sound good, it was Yuzo.  With exception to SOR 3 as you mentioned, I just didn't dig it.

[CrackTiger]

I got both of the .hes files to run on my TED v2.2 and they both sound great.

So what's the deal with the 22KHz samples version? Does the PC Engine hardware read them and just play them back at the max sample rate it can do without custom programming or is that included in conversions from Deflemask?

[spenoza]

Dang it, now I want more good belt scroller games on the PCE. There weren't many.

[FraGMarE]

I got both of the .hes files to run on my TED v2.2 and they both sound great.

So what's the deal with the 22KHz samples version? Does the PC Engine hardware read them and just play them back at the max sample rate it can do without custom programming or is that included in conversions from Deflemask?

IIRC, each individual PSG channel is capable of many different frequencies, up to and far exceeding 22KHz... at a cost of CPU resource and ROM/RAM space.  7KHz just seems to be the "magic number", by consensus, among programmers types as the optimal rate for using in a game and not hogging up too much CPU resource.  I'm sure Bonknuts or CCovell or somebody could explain why better than I.

[ccovell]

As mentioned earlier (?) 7.16 Khz is the fastest setting that the CPU timer interrupt can be set to, making it a natural choice for music engines to use for timing their PCM samples.  Faster than that, you'd need to rely on HSync interrupts from the video hardware, or do CPU wait loops (the brute-force way).

[FraGMarE]

Plus, 7.16KHz drums samples are guaranteed to give you those nostalgic Devil's Crush/Blazing Lazers "feels" 

[CrackTiger]

So does deflemask add in cpu wait loops or something?

[FraGMarE]

As mentioned earlier (?) 7.16 Khz is the fastest setting that the CPU timer interrupt can be set to, making it a natural choice for music engines to use for timing their PCM samples.  Faster than that, you'd need to rely on HSync interrupts from the video hardware, or do CPU wait loops (the brute-force way).

So are you saying that you ONLY get that benefit when the samples match the CPU clock?  For example, you couldn't just straight up use the CPU int if, say, the sample was an exact of multiple of 7.16 (like 14.32Khz) at a cost of higher resource usage?

[elmer]

So what's the deal with the 22KHz samples version? Does the PC Engine hardware read them and just play them back at the max sample rate it can do without custom programming or is that included in conversions from Deflemask?

The PCE hardware doesn't have any mechanism to sequentially read sample-values from memory.

That's the problem that us programmer-types have to deal with. 

It has 1 sample-value-register per channel, and that represents just one instantaneous volume value at one tiny point-in-time.

In order to play back a sample (aka WAV file), the PCE's CPU must run a program to change the instantaneous-value that's in that register thousands of times every second (aka the sample-rate).

That takes a significant amount of CPU time.

So does deflemask add in cpu wait loops or something?

Deflemask's .HES playback code just sits in a tight loop, which their programmer has very-carefully timed, and it does nothing at all except sit there and write instantaneous-values to the PSG's sample-value-registers every 1/32000s, 1/22000s, 1/16000s. or 1/8000s.

It uses 99% of the PCE's CPU just to output those instantaneous-value settings to the PSG's registers at *exactly* the right times to support those different sample-rates.

Then there's an interrupt every 1/60th of a second that stops writing the samples, and writes all of the other PSG registers (like the channel volume, frequency and waveform), and that takes the remaining 1% of the PCE's CPU time.

It's all used-up ... there is no CPU time left. 

That's fine for Deflemask ... but it is totally impractical in a game, where we'd actually like the CPU to spend some time doing "useful" stuff like updating graphics and responding to player inputs.

So are you saying that you ONLY get that benefit when the samples match the CPU clock?  For example, you couldn't just straight up use the CPU int if, say, the sample was an exact of multiple of 7.16 (like 14.32Khz) at a cost of higher resource usage?

Nope, he's saying that the *fastest* that the timer can run is 7KHz (not 7.16 ... you're confusing the CPU's 7.16MHz clock with the 7KHz timer (7.16MHz / 1024).

The point is, that in normal game programming, we actually write our code so that we spend thousands and tens of thousands of CPU cycles actually updating graphics on the screen, figuring out what sprites to display and where, and responding to user input.

In order to keep on updating the PSG's instantaneous-value registers regularly so that the user hears a continuous sample (aka WAV), we have to interrupt whatever the CPU is doing, and quickly run some code that updates those registers, and then return back to continue processing whatever-it-was that we were doing.

There are only 3 sensible mechanisms available for us to trigger those regular interrupts ...
1) 7KHz timer
2) 8KHz every-other-hblank
3) 16KHz every-single-hblank

That's it. Those are the 3 sample-rates that the PCE sensibly supports.

It costs more CPU time to process an hblank interrupt than a timer interrupt, and the quality-difference between 7KHz and 8KHz isn't enough to warrant the expense, so the 2 normal choices are either 7KHz or 16KHz.

The CPU cost, and ROM cost for using 16KHz samples instead of 7KHz samples is obviously over twice-as-much, and so the normal choice is just to output samples at the 7KHz rate.

[CrackTiger]

So then even the "in-game" version of that SoR track is more or less maxing out the cpu resources, because deflemask is simply a wholy inefficient method of producing PCE chip tunes, even when the end result isn't any more special than existing chip tunes from commercial games?

[elmer]

So then even the "in-game" version of that SoR track is more or less maxing out the cpu resources, because deflemask is simply a wholy inefficient method of producing PCE chip tunes, even when the end result isn't any more special than existing chip tunes from commercial games?

With the locked-loop code that's in the Deflemask .hes player, I can't see much reason why they couldn't support 44.1KHz or 48KHz samples, if they'd wished to have done so.

It's Deflemask's .hes code that's cr*p, and the reason that it can never be anything other than cr*p, is the ill-conceived decision to allow sample rates other than 7KHz, 8KHz, or 16KHz.

Those are the only ones that can be processed on the PCE with any measure of efficiency.

There's not really even anything wrong with deflemask's .hes exporter ... it was designed to do a single job, and not to be used in new game production. It fulfills its purpose, so I shouldn't really call it cr*p.

The .hes format itself is totally unsuitable for games.

It's just a recording of the register values that are sent to the PSG by each game's own sound driver.

No in-game sound driver ever worked like that (that I know of), because it is terribly inefficient.


Deflemask itself, as a tool, is a perfectly good way to develop music for new games, and has little practical difference to how folks used to create music back-in-the-day, except that it's a lot more user-friendly with its GUI and its in-GUI emulated playback (what-you-hear-is-what-you-get).

It is actually by-far-the-best way that I've seen to develop music for these old systems, and beats the heck out of what was available BITD.

There are only a couple of "tricks" (that I know of) that the old drivers could do that Deflemask can't (currently), but that can be worked-around, and possibly added in future versions.

Just, for-gawds-sake, limit yourself to never using anything other than 8KHz or 16KHz samples in it (and hopefully 7KHz, someday)! 

The biggest problem, at the moment, is that there is no way to get the music data out of deflemask and into a format that can be used efficiently in an in-game sound driver.

That's what I'm currently working on doing.

The way that the music notes, and timing, and effects data themselves are created is perfectly fine for in-game use, and has no important difference from how Japanese developers used MML back in the 1980s/1990s.

Remember ... pure MML data from a text file, or exported from 3MLE isn't usable with the PCE's System Card Player either. It needs to be translated/compiled into the right format for that driver to understand, and until Arkhan wrote Squirrel, nobody here could use that, either.

Now we just need to do the same sort of thing with deflemask data.

****************


While I continue to be mean to poor bonknuts about it ... there's no particular reason to say that the 16KHz sample rate is a bad one to use. It's just a balance of how much CPU power and memory space you have, and how you choose to use it.

My background prompts me to fight to keep as much time as possible available for the game itself, but that doesn't mean that it's always the right thing to do, especially at points where the game code isn't actually doing very much (i.e. title screens, etc).

It's not even a hard-and-fast rule for in-game use ... it all depends upon what your game code is doing. It's up to the programmer to know that, and for any development team to decide for themselves.

[ccovell]

7KHz (not 7.16 ... you're confusing the CPU's 7.16MHz clock with the 7KHz timer (7.16MHz / 1024).

No confusion... I was just bad at math (7.16 / 1024), sorry.

[TurboXray]

Just to add to the discussion:

 There is 14khz mode too. You use the timer interrupt, but you have a timed loop to write the second cycle before exit. Normally, this would instantly put a restraint on cpu resource at 50% (because of the timed loop), but you could do something like 40% with a shorter loop. In that timed loop, you could also support additional sample to other channels for FREE. Or you can do 10.5khz with every other timer call being timed loop to two samples .. for roughly ~31% cpu resource. All using the timer interrupt (not hysnc).

 But honestly.. not a whole lot of samples really benefit from 16khz vs 7khz with 5bit resolution. 7khz @ 8bit sounds much better than 14khz @ 5bit.

[CrackTiger]

But honestly.. not a whole lot of samples really benefit from 16khz vs 7khz with 5bit resolution. 7khz @ 8bit sounds much better than 14khz @ 5bit.

I didn't notice a difference between the 8KHz and 22KHz samples playing through my TV set.

[FraGMarE]

I'm pretty sure I get it now.  7KHz samples are "almost" free, where as anything more requires some big elaborate loop and hogs CPU time.  Makes sense.  That being said, I wasn't saying that 5 channel DMF/HES i linked are ready-to-go in any kind of game or demo, it could probably be vastly optimized more.  I'm just saying that's how it would sound if it were. 

BTW, Updated the links in original post with new files.  The 5 channel version includes just about everything from the 6 channel version now, plus cleaner/louder 8khz samples and now sounds ALMOST the same as the 6 channel version.  Both should sound about as close as I'm going to get to the Genesis track without clean-sounding wave phasing to get that hard KNOCK out of the first 29ms or so of the synth bassline beat.

[CrackTiger]

Can you please make a version with 6 channels and 8KHz samples?

[FraGMarE]

Can you please make a version with 6 channels and 8KHz samples?

I could make a DMF version with 32KHz samples, then you could go into Deflemask and just set the sample rate to anything you want and export to HES

I probably should have made the full version's samples 32KHz to begin with heh

I gotta ask, though... why?  Just gotta have that slightly muffled Devil's Crush drum sample sound?  ;)

[CrackTiger]

Can you please make a version with 6 channels and 8KHz samples?

I could make a DMF version with 32KHz samples, then you could go into Deflemask and just set the sample rate to anything you want and export to HES

I probably should have made the full version's samples 32KHz to begin with heh

I gotta ask, though... why?  Just gotta have that slightly muffled Devil's Crush drum sample sound?  ;)

Is the absent channel of the "in-game" version just additional samples in the 6 channel version?

There's no need for good PC Engine bgms to use less than 6 channels if the composer has use for all of them. Even if the two lowest priority channels switch to sound effects when they occur, it wouldn't sound much different in-game than the full 6 channel music playing with two additional channels of sound effects.

It would just be nice to have a version with pratical samples and the full chiptune, to record from real hardware to showcase what the PC Engine could realistically do at a minimum.

[TurboXray]

I gotta ask, though... why?  Just gotta have that slightly muffled Devil's Crush drum sample sound?  ;)

You got an extra channel - do some phasing effects.

[spenoza]

You maybe thought I was joking. I REALLY want a beat 'em up I can sink my teeth into. Fragmare has already committed to the soundtrack, see?  ; )

[Michirin9801]

You maybe thought I was joking. I REALLY want a beat 'em up I can sink my teeth into. Fragmare has already committed to the soundtrack, see?  ; )

So do I! But you know, I don't think it HAS to be Streets of Rage...
Personally, I'd vouch to make a brand new one ;3

[_Paul]

You maybe thought I was joking. I REALLY want a beat 'em up I can sink my teeth into. Fragmare has already committed to the soundtrack, see?  ; )

So do I! But you know, I don't think it HAS to be Streets of Rage...
Personally, I'd vouch to make a brand new one ;3

SOR is good but overrated. Many beat 'em ups get very repetitive which is something Golden Axe and Alien Storm seemed to avoid. I'd love to see an Alien Storm II. But that's wandering off topic...

[Digi.k]

Really good work!

[Michirin9801]

You maybe thought I was joking. I REALLY want a beat 'em up I can sink my teeth into. Fragmare has already committed to the soundtrack, see?  ; )

So do I! But you know, I don't think it HAS to be Streets of Rage...
Personally, I'd vouch to make a brand new one ;3

SOR is good but overrated. Many beat 'em ups get very repetitive which is something Golden Axe and Alien Storm seemed to avoid. I'd love to see an Alien Storm II. But that's wandering off topic...

I haven't played Alien Storm, but I hated Golden Axe >w>
From my experience SoR2 is the better Beat'em up on the system, but I enjoy the SNES beat'em ups better, Knights of the Round, Final Fight 3, Battletoads in Battlemaniacs, Batman Returns (to an extent), all of those I enjoy more than the SoR games...
But of course, that's all just my opinion...

[Arkhan Asylum]

I haven't played Alien Storm, but I hated Golden Axe >w>
From my experience SoR2 is the better Beat'em up on the system, but I enjoy the SNES beat'em ups better, Knights of the Round, Final Fight 3, Battletoads in Battlemaniacs, Batman Returns (to an extent), all of those I enjoy more than the SoR games...
But of course, that's all just my opinion...

lol.  Battletoads in Battlemaniacs is pretty shitty.  I thought it was the tits as a kid, but after replaying it, I think I'd rather just play the NES one.   Or Battletoads vs Double Dragon.

One of my favorite Beat em offs though was Pirates of Darkwater on SNES.   The music was sweet.

Most beat em offs get pretty boring, even Batman Returns, despite it being one of the funner ones.   I play the Sailor Moon ones mostly.   They have better music than most of this other shit, and aren't very long compared to other ones. 

Golden Axe's perk is the level interactivity.  This is where BTDD also shines. Streets of Rage is kind of just like "walk forward and sometimes down at an angle.  thank god the music doesn't suck or this would be shit."


Maximum Carnage and Punisher, gooooo..

yeah most Beat em offs kinda blow.   I can't say I really miss them on the PCE.   They'd be boring there too probably.   lol.

[ParanoiaDragon]

I remember enjoying Maximum Carnage, though, maybe that was just the Spider-man fan in me.  I recall it being super hard, & finished it using a game genie or shark or whatever BITD.

[Arkhan Asylum]

oh, MC was fucking awesome.   I meant GOOOOOOOOOO as in "fuck yeha gitchu some".

[Michirin9801]

Maximum Carnage is allright >w>

To be fair, I haven't played Battlemaniacs in years, but I have very fond memories of it...
Haven't played Pirates of Darkwater, never even heard of it actually, but I'm a bit of a fan of beat'em ups, I enjoy most of the ones I play, I just really, REALLY didn't like Golden Axe for some reason >w>

I forgot to mention the Ninja Warriors Again, but I was probably blocking it off my memory because it's a side-scrolling one, it plays pretty different from all the other ones mentioned, but that aside, it's like, one of my favourites! The graphics are simply perfect, the music is even more perfect and the gameplay is surprisingly deep! I love it, I can't have enough of it!

The only one I can think of that I enjoy more than it is Final Fight 3, yeah I know it's shallow, easy and short, but it's got branching paths! I LOVE Branching Paths, I think a game that's short but has lots of branching paths is the best kind of game because you can play it multiple times and see something different every time you play it!
And it's a LOT better than procedurally-generated crap because branching paths give you both the ability to see different things in different playthroughs AND proper hand-crafted level design that you can memorise! I think it's the ideal game design choice and I'm gonna put branching paths in a LOT of my games! Heck, branching paths is the core idea behind my very first game, the one for the MD that I've mentioned a couple of times...
Anyway, Final Fight 3, the graphics are just as perfect as Ninja Warriors Again, the music gives me chills of joy, the composition in that soundtrack is otherworldly! They've got multiple melodies playing at once and somehow still in harmony, and they often even have the bass playing its own melody on top of that! And unlike the SoR soundtracks the Final Fight 3 soundtrack ISN'T REPETITIVE!
I can only dream of ever making a soundtrack that good...
And the gameplay, while shallow, has a great variety of moves and it just 'feels' better than most other beat'em ups I've played...

[Arkhan Asylum]

I have fond memories of Battlemaniacs also, since I grew up playing it and still remember when I went in and bought it as a kid, but now it's like "man this is a little doofy".  Some of the enemies just take forever for no real reason. 

I'm not shocked that you have never heard of PoDW.   People who were coherent when the cartoon aired haven't even heard of it.   They cancelled the show before they finished it, even though it was awesome.

https://youtu.be/oKqGBi1tdSo   lol, horrible sampled guitar nonsense.  It's still pretty good though. 

Ninja Warriors Again is also pretty good.   Regular Ninja Warriors, not really.  ;)

Turtles in Time is probably the best Beat em Off around though.     

[Michirin9801]

I'm not shocked that you have never heard of PoDW.   People who were coherent when the cartoon aired haven't even heard of it.   They cancelled the show before they finished it, even though it was awesome.

lol, horrible sampled guitar nonsense.  It's still pretty good though. 

Gonna check the game out, I have a place in my heart for bad guitar samples lol

Ninja Warriors Again is also pretty good.   Regular Ninja Warriors, not really.  ;)

OOOOHHHHHHH!!! YES! Someone agrees \(>w<)/
Every time I bring up Ninja Warriors Again someone goes "Nah, the original is better because Zuntata and because 80s, blah blah blah!"
And I'm like "What's wrong with these people? Yeah the original is good, but this SNES game is just so much better in pretty much every way!"

Turtles in Time is probably the best Beat em Off around though.   

OH MY GOSH! How could I forget it? I've played it all the time but it just didn't come to my mind for some reason >o<';
Yeah, it's way up there, one of the better ones, which remind me of Hyperstone Heist on the Genesis, which while not 'quite' as good as Turtles in time, it's REALLY good too, I think I enjoy it more than the SoR games, particularly the soundtrack, that one sounds great both on the SNES and on the MD!

[CrackTiger]

You maybe thought I was joking. I REALLY want a beat 'em up I can sink my teeth into. Fragmare has already committed to the soundtrack, see?  ; )

No one doubts that you are serious. Hopefully fragmare can finish the soundtrack by the time you complete the rest of the game.

I assume that you plan to record the tracks from a PC Engine and then play them back in-game as redbook?

[spenoza]

No one doubts that you are serious. Hopefully fragmare can finish the soundtrack by the time you complete the rest of the game.

I am completing it in my head. If you want a copy outside my head, tough  ; )

The SNES had a lot of beat-em-ups, but none of them were as good as SoR2. SoR2 is the pinnacle of the form in the 16-bit space. Final Fight 3 was a definite improvement on 1 and 2 (which were pretty basic) and was better than SoR1, but not 2 or 3. Although I guess TMNT IV was pretty close, but not as much from the mechanics of the game as the theme and eye-candy. Honestly, Super Double Dragon, had it been properly finished instead of rushed out the door, might have managed to rival SoR2, but since it was rushed it falls short.

A souped-up version of the NES Double Dragon III would have been pretty great on the PCE. I think the PCE Double Dragon II certainly compares favorable to the NES version.

[Michirin9801]

The SNES had a lot of beat-em-ups, but none of them were as good as SoR2. SoR2 is the pinnacle of the form in the 16-bit space. Final Fight 3 was a definite improvement on 1 and 2 (which were pretty basic) and was better than SoR1, but not 2 or 3. Although I guess TMNT IV was pretty close, but not as much from the mechanics of the game as the theme and eye-candy. Honestly, Super Double Dragon, had it been properly finished instead of rushed out the door, might have managed to rival SoR2, but since it was rushed it falls short.

I can totally understand where people are coming from when they give SoR2 such high praise, but I can't really say I agree with it >w>
But hey, different strokes for different folks...

I just played a little bit of Pirates of the Dark Water, and yeah, it's pretty awesome! The gameplay feels great, the controls are very responsive, the moves are satisfying and the presentation is pretty nice too!
I'm still playing it as I'm typing this out, but so far, my impressions of the game are great, and it really warms my heart to see that Sunsoft made it! Back in the NES days, Sunsoft were the masters of licensed games, anything they got the license for turned out great, and even when they didn't get the license for it, they made something original that also turned out great! (Journey to Silius)
But as far as I'm concerned, the 16 bit days were their downfall...
Still, it's great to see a really good 16 bit Sunsoft game!

Another SNES Beat'em up that I like is Sonic Blast Man 2, I've never played the first game but I hear it's kinda crappy, but the second game is pretty fun! It's nothing amazing or anything, but it's solid and well-made, worth a playthrough or two!

Oh and, Double Dragon II on the PCE CD is pretty awesome! I'd definitely pick that over the NES version!

[ParanoiaDragon]

Ninja Warriors Again(I think it was called Return in the US instead of Again) is one of my favorites from when I was a kiddo!  Love that game, showed it recently to a buddy of mine that didn't know it existed.

Never played Pirates of Darkwater, but I did watch the show as a kid!

[Michirin9801]

Ninja Warriors Again(I think it was called Return in the US instead of Again) is one of my favorites from when I was a kiddo!  Love that game, showed it recently to a buddy of mine that didn't know it existed.

Never played Pirates of Darkwater, but I did watch the show as a kid!

It was called simply "The Ninja Warriors" in the US, same name as the arcade, but I called it by its Japanese name not to cause any confusion...

[FraGMarE]

Quite a bit of an update on this one.  Should sound MUCH better now.  A lot bassier and much closer to the original tune.

Streets of Rage - Fighting In The Street (TurboGrafx-16 Cover) ROM file download

[CrackTiger]

Wow, that's a big difference and very bassy.