misfiled as "Keet, Electric" @ElectricKeet@awoo.space

'96 Zenkoku Koukou Soccer Senshuken – 8|6: Clear sound, quality samples, energetic feel-good themes with recurring motifs. Could easily be mistaken for long-lost Wii Sports tracks.

Zenkoku Koukou Soccer Senshuken 2 – 5|5: Middling sound, though I like how the track "Practice Makes Perfect" has a few intentionally (I hope?) off notes near the loop point – narrative through musical elements!

The old flat-panel TV that my wife and I were using in our bedroom has broken in the weirdest ways. It suddenly started refusing to switch to 50Hz mode, and now it displays input – not the menus, just the input – with what looks like an 80% teal overlay. This happens on both HDMI inputs (the third broke some time ago), and I've tested with three different sources. Tested the cable, too. Even did a factory reset. It's just... busted.

Technology and I have not been getting along well lately.

Zero: The Kamikaze Squirrel – 5|4: Hooray, it's adequate! Often muddy and crowded.

• Here's where we encounter our first "unavailable" soundtrack – Zero 4 Champ RR-Z, which has had neither a music data rip nor any clean recordings that I can find conveniently. Gameplay videos show it to be on par with its predecessor, up next.

Zero 4 Champ RR – 6|5: Varied styles, solid composition, fairly decent sound quality.

Tool-assisted speedrun of Super Metroid, item collection 0%, console verified.

Just... let that soak in.

http://tasvideos.org/3628M.html

Today started pretty rough, but it got better with a little help from my friends. I'm seriously thankful for all of you.

Also, there was Thai food. Never underestimate the morale-boosting power of Thai food. *grin*

Zombies Ate My Neighbors – 7|3: Surprisingly dynamic and full of Danny-Elfman-esque character, but some atrocious sound engineering. Well worth listening to... once.

Zig Zag Cat – 6|5: Nicely varied in tone with some compelling tracks, but several clunkers and some muddiness.

Zico Soccer – 7|4: Actually pretty nifty except for where it's ruined by terrible crowd noises baked into the in-game tracks.

Yes, we're going in reverse alphabetical order.

Zootto Mahjong – 6|5: Cheerful, decently polished, but unambitious.

Zoop – 7|5: Decent jazzy composition hampered a bit by mediocre engineering.

Zool – 6|4: This also nails the goofy theme and does it reasonably well, but it feels sloppy in a couple glaring ways; samples used outside natural ranges, iffy volume balance, no attenuation for higher pitches, stuff like that.

Each soundtrack will now get two numbers to go along with my comments, styled like "P|Q". P is the music's peak awesomeness, and Q is how far it falls down.

For example, an 8|3 might mean excellent themes that suffer for crap samples, or perhaps that some tracks deserve a replay while others deserve to be skipped. The new numbers will help explain the comments, and vice-versa!

Conveniently, a modified repost follows.

Ah, I was wondering when the cessation of my regular TMS sessions would catch up with me.

It's not an all-at-once thing, of course. It's a slide from "maybe I can handle things" to "maybe I can handle things if shit stops going wrong" to "why the fuck am I crying about having to make a phone call".

Please don't make a big deal of it, but if I'm a little out of sorts in the near future... well, here's why.

I found out how to get rid of the irregular lag and random pauses I was getting from my wireless XBone controller!

All it took was a USB cable. *sigh*

(Yes, in reverse alphabetical order.)

Zootto Mahjong – 6: Cheerful, decently polished, but unambitious.

Zoop – 7: Decent jazzy composition hampered by mediocre engineering (sound driver, samples, all that), not unlike....

Zool – 6: This also nails the theme and does it reasonably well, but it feels sloppy in a couple glaring ways; samples used outside natural ranges, iffy volume balance, no attenuation for higher pitches, stuff like that. Almost got a 7.

10 Transcendent: Even non-SNES-fans should listen.
9 Seminal: Quality in all ways, phenomenal in many.
8 Excellent: Adding to my portable music player.
7 Memorable: Some aspect is particularly good.
6 Competent: Well-executed, nothing outstanding.
5 Mediocre: Does the job, gets the paycheck.
4 Disappointing: Not pablum, but not quite appetising.
3 Questionable: Inferior effort? Bad port?
2 Annoying: Listening through is a struggle.
1 Broken: How did this get published?

I considered commenting on _every_ soundtrack, but a lot of them would end up being like this:

"Here's another bucket of mediocre slush that does little but fill the silence behind a game I don't even recognise. It's not toxic, but there's nothing to recommend it."

Instead, I'll just add comments when warranted on top of a numeric rating scale, which I'll post next. This way I can batch these and not spam everyone with over 1500 individual posts.

Okay, look, I submitted a comment on _one_ bill and explicitly opted out of return contact by anyone involved, and still the Democrats in the house stick me on a mailing list to hear more about their political sausage-making?

Pro tip to any political figure invested in the two-party system: Just 'cause you're not the first up against the wall doesn't mean you're not second, savvy?

Grr.

Just finished my first play through _Metroid: Rogue Dawn_ – a romhack of the original _Metroid_ on the NES which completely reworks it into a prequel with a vastly different story, different protagonist, new items, wholly new layouts and graphics, new soundtrack, built-in saving (no more passwords!), a map system....

It's really good. If you can stomach some of the original game's quirks (janky physics, lag, hitting Select for missiles) it's definitely worth your time.

https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/3280/

More #SNESmusic vastness amusement:

The SNES' audio processing unit ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_S-SMP ) holds 64KB of RAM for storing sample data, the echo buffer, and such.

An SPC file is essentially just a small metadata chunk tacked onto a memory dump of that RAM. This means that every SPC is 64KB plus a tiny bit. Within a single game's soundtrack, most of that data is repeated in each track, so it compresses well.

The 7Zip archives take up 173MB.
Unpacked, these total well over 2GB.

How vast is #SNESmusic?

Counting only the 1517 soundtracks presently ripped to SPC format (I haven't folded in the few in SNSF, and several games resist ripping altogether)...

There are 34,789 tracks among them. Some of these are just very short sound effect tracks, some are long loops of ambient sound, some are merely alternate versions or duplicates, but those probably don't account for more than a tiny fraction of the total playtime:

5wk 3d 14h 41m 48s.

This will take a while.