Dragon Slayer Jr.: Romancia (PC-88) - Opening Gate (Sega Master System SN76489+YM2413 Cover)
Channel: Andrew Ambrose
Date: 2023-05-23

Yuzo Koshiro began his career in the video game industry with his work at Nihon Falcom in 1986. The first two games that involved his original music were the likes of Xanadu: Scenario 2 and Dragon Slayer Jr.: Romancia for the PC-88 family of computers by NEC (fun fact, Yuzo was only 18 when both of those games were first released!). In the case of Romancia, he solely did the game's title theme, Opening Gate (the rest of the music was composed by Takahito Abe), a great early demonstration of Yuzo's ability to make something epic and rockin' using only 3 FM channels and 3 PSG/noise channels (all PC-88 models at that time, excluding the PC-8801 and the PC-8801mkII, included the Yamaha YM2203, a.k.a. the OPN). I've been playing around with Yamaha's YM2413 (a.k.a. the OPLL) lately thanks to tildearrow's Furnace tracker, and hearing Opening Gate gave me the idea to attempt a cover of the song with the YM2413 and its preset trumpet instrument (along with the preset synth and clarinet instruments for good measure). I was originally going to use the YM2413 by itself again, but I realized that it would be too hard for me to recreate the song's percussion with the chip's drum mode, and it would instead be easier to recreate the PSG and noise channels of the song using the SN76489, most famously used in the Sega Master System (the YM2413 was used for both the Sega Mark 3 FM Sound Unit and the Japanese version of the Sega Master System, so the SN76489 is a perfect fit for it). This project took a little more time than I thought it would, mainly because I had to use Hoot instead of foobar2000's Game Emu Player plugin (no one seems to have done a VGM rip of Romancia's music yet), which meant I couldn't slow down the song or skip around it to hear certain parts. Despite this, I managed to complete this without too much issue, and it came out great. I hope you all enjoy this, and be sure to let me know what you think of it. ^w^

Here are the downloads for this song: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1uRa-Ah0wh_u_x1fKCYOWhY6FzFN48yNe?usp=sharing

Composed by: Yuzo Koshiro (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCe_lUL6kLzZLS49SIdHly5A)
Master System Arrangement by: Andrew Ambrose



Patreon Shout-outs:
Austin Kaiser
Holly
Andyana
Eric M Ambrose

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