Gagert
commented
4 years ago This might be old news (was news to me), but there's a NES emulator, Mesen, that has gotten the ability to replace the ingame sprites and audio of the NES games themselves now.
Mesen Castlevania with upgraded graphics
Maybe similar code could be applied to an emulator such as this, so that games with decent gameplay but with a soundtrack that's lacking (instruments that sounds off while the composition might be fairly decent) could have it's entire soundtrack swapped with an HD soundtrack instead, thereby making the game pass the test of time with a higher extent?
Some time ago I read in the Sonic Retro forums regarding a way to make custom music run instead of the ingame soundtrack in Sonic 2 for the Genesis, using an application called Sonic 2 mp3 tool. This application was made to work with the old-school emulators Gens 2.11 or Gens Plus.
As demonstrated in this video
Sonic 2 mp3 tool have a page on Sonic Retro here, and it was going to be replaced with SonMP3, a tool that was going to be made to work with more Sonic games for the Genesis.
This made me thinking, have a feature as such ever been considered in this libretro core? I have no idea how complex it would be to code such a feature, neither if such a feature would gather much if any interest at all by the users of this core if it was successfully developed.
The reason I'm bringing it up, is just out of curiosity. I love the sound chip of the Sega Master System; I think most of the games sounds ok enough with it's sound chip. The Sega Genesis on the other hand have games such as Sonic 3 & Knuckles, which in my opinion has a complete soundtrack that sounds great even to this day. Some games however, have this thin, scratchy, almost (in my opinion) ear-bleeding music (I'm looking at you, options-menu music in Sonic Spinball).
If there was an option to replace the in-game music for certain games (to either mp3 or ogg files or similar) to maybe a more modern rendition of the same soundtrack in this emulator core, there are games that I think my ears would enjoy a lot more compared to the original soundtrack.
Maybe if not that, an option to exchange some of the "ear bleeding" instruments to an other variant, similar to how in the old days different sound cards on PCs made the same midi file sound different?