Sonic Forces - Death Crab Pursuit (Sega Genesis Remix)

16-bit chiptune demake cover of "Death Crab Pursuit" from Sonic Forces, compatible with the Sega Genesis / Sega Mega Drive console.

DOWNLOAD (MP3, VGZ & DMF):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1x8VG...
Feel free to use it for your videos or fangames.
NOTE: You need a VGM player to open the VGZ file, and the DMF is only for DefleMask.

MORE SONIC FORCES:
*Genesis (16-bit): https://youtu.be/playlist?list=PLUXhD...
·Master System (8-bit): https://youtu.be/playlist?list=PLUXhD...
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Technical info
·Program: DefleMask Tracker v0.12.0
·System: Sega Genesis / Sega Mega Drive (YM2612 [FM], SN76496 [PSG], Sega DAC [PCM])
·FM instruments loaded: 7
·PSG instruments loaded: 1
·Unique PCM samples loaded: 2
·Max. FM channels active: 6 (5 when hi-hats are not in use)
·Max. PSG channels active: 3
·FM channel 6: Set to DAC and FM (hi-hats are FM)
·PSG channel 4: Free range white noise
·Tempo: 157.5 BPM (clock 42Hz, speed 02/02)
·Time in development: 1 week
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
About the song:
I think I haven't made a remix as close to the original as this since Spaceport. My Spaceport remix was the one that made me try to keep the instrument count as low as possible, but this song is now confirmation that forcing it doesn't make the song any better, it depends more on the composition itself, instead you should focus on making it sound good by itself, which was what I always did until I got into FM synthesis. Speaking of composition, I love how basically all chords in the song are minor, and I also appreciate how many channels I had free for the strings, it allowed me to have them on multiple channels so they could interact more with themselves through the ADSR release and not just be notes one after the other. It's funny how the strings are the biggest difference between this and the original, orchestral instruments are the Genesis' weak point, or mine at least.

Thankfully this song is rather short and simple, which makes it easier to manage. However, having less instruments puts them on a spotlight, so it's more important that you have the right instruments, and that to me means a lot of searching and editing. The strings were particularly important, so of course they were the most heavily edited. The weird thing about the FM strings is that it's like a saw wave with static noise on top, and making it less saw-shaped would make it more bell-like, which was bad, and making it less noisy would make it more of a saw wave, which sounded fine but was not what I wanted, and I had to find a balance between the two. Not to imply that I made it from scratch, it was an instrument from Devilish that I edited to fit this better.

It's amazing how well everything fits, I usually struggle with space and end up relying on the PSG channels for what doesn't fit, but this song is not as demanding. The only time I had to use square waves was because the original used them, that's super rare. And I didn't even need to edit any hi-hats, I just used the one I made for Imperial Tower, I think it's now become my standard FM hi-hat.

About the picture:
I knew before that the Genesis could do this perspective thing because of OutRun, but I never thought of a boss fight with it until I played Contra Hard Corps where they do exactly this, and it's awesome.

The Death Crab sprite was drawn by me, I made a vague outline of 8x8 squares of where things should be and its size, and then drew over that, I used screenshots and some videos for reference to know how it moves and to position things right. The cacti were also drawn by me, I used the crystals in Green Hill Zone as reference but did not edit them, they were drawn from scratch, and funnily enough, the bigger sprite was a "scrapped" version, they were made for another picture I made before. The mountains and bushes in the background are from Launch Base Zone. The striped grass is from OutRun, I would not be able to make perspective like that. The rocks thrown are asteroids from The Doomsday Zone (also Angel Island but not the 7x7 ones) recolored to fit the stage. The checkered path was somewhat hard to do, I couldn't think of a way to do it and I couldn't understand what OutRun and Contra were doing, and after many failed attempts, I remembered Photoshop can warp things like that, it was easy to do, just had to make a series of 32x96 stripes, 352 pixels long, merge the layers, warp that symmetrically to a 60° angle, take a screenshot of it aliased, downsize it x3, copypaste half of it, and finally add the squares by recoloring the stripes with the OutRun lines as guidance. Simple.