Awhile ago I made this post searching for a very specific NES chiptune player. Well, I found it! And I got a recording to show it.
Lagrange Point was an RPG by Konami for the NES, and it's also the only game that ever used their VRC7 sound chip. Instead of an NES-style chiptune sound, it's got an FM chip that sounds a lot like the one that's in the Genesis or some 8-bit computers1. It's a really unusual sound for the NES, and they did some pretty cool stuff with it. The first song in this post is what it's meant to sound like, taken from a modern NES emulator.
And, well. When you have a one-off chip that doesn't share tech with any other game on the system, it took awhile to get emulated. I remember early NES emulators didn't support it at all, and neither did the early NSF2 players. So I was excited when Meridian, one of the early players, announced a release with experimental VRC7 support. But... it didn't sound like the song in the first MP3 in this post. It sounded like the second one.
I thought that was what the VRC7 was supposed to sound like for awhile! It wasn't until I tried it in another, more advanced NSF player that I realized it was completely wrong. That scratchy sound is actually pretty cool, though - it's unique, it's interesting, in a good way. It gives it flavour. Feels almost like it got caught on the radio tuned just slightly wrong. I don't know how many other people ever heard this version of it, but I've always had this weird nostalgia for it.
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It's actually the exact same chip as the MSX-Music, and also the one used in the Japanese Master System.
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NES sound rip format. A way to listen to emulated NES music without bringing up the whole game.
