Some audacious ports from Mana series, Undertale and more...

Hello C3!!!
As last season, I unfortunately am not as thoroughly prepared as I wish. For example, my romhack concept still is doing its baby steps.

This said, I want to showcase and submit some ports that took a good amount of grind to complete.

I wish you a happy listening.

List of ports:

01. Chrono Trigger - Tyran castle (1:1 wip 6/8 channels and tuning issues: explanation below)
02. Secret of Mana - Distant Thunder (unsampled)
03. Secret of Mana - Distant Thunder (Trials of Mana style)
04. Trials of Mana - Frenzy (unsampled)
05. Trials of Mana - Harvest November (unsampled, exclusive)
06. Trials of Mana - Political Pressure (1:1)
07. Trials of Mana - Political Pressure (unsampled)
08. Trials of Mana - Raven (1:1)
09. Trials of Mana - Raven (unsampled)
10. Undertale - Another Medium (arranged)

Now, you can either listen them online, download the spc bundle or go and find the submissions to the music section :
listen | download | links !1 2 3 4 !5 6 7 8 9 10

Also I have some walltext to comment on the making for those interested, so buckle up! But before that, here goes for my little rant, it has been a bit more than one year that I learned porting on regular basis, on top of my day job duties, and I must say: so far I am really proud of my progress, although sometimes publicly sharing really does feel ungrateful. I believe I am bringing to the table some songs that are different or not necessarily popular. I also appreciated a lot the requests I have treated so far, thanks for your trust guys, be it Infinity, OrangeBronzeDaisy, Green Jerry, K.T.B. or Brutapode89.

Tyran Castle :

comment: So this work overlapped with KevinM's version nearly at the same time, but due to IRL I had to leave it WIP. It's only gotta live here on C3 and god this is a blessing because it sounds janky as can be. But I wanted to say I am proud of myself for going through such an ordeal: instrument changes, tempo change, lots of samples to tune, I even tried to adjust the pan the way it is done in the original source, but to no avail, eats up too much ARAM. So here there's this, it's only 6-channel completed so far and the tuning, and the pitch bends all are approximative. But nevertheless I decided to show it. Maybe I'll be able to finish it off for the sake of glory!

Distant Thunder:

This port first has been made for the Super Famicompo 2 and it gave me great difficulty with all its instrument changes among channels. The feedback received was good enough (ranked mid-list) and I improved it according to the comments. Only then came the idea to re-sample it in the style of Trials of Mana. I searched the most suitable samples and to no surprise there were a lot, except claps and bassoon.

Frenzy:

So first of all I didn't know Infinity already was on that before beginning, actually I posted a former version of that work to Super Famicompo 2 but I was using a midi extracted from an older build of vgmtrans, so a lot of notes were offset. After a fruitiful Discord convo, a friendly user sent me an updated version of vgmtrans, and I became able to finish the work. Oh! It features a cool pitch modulation stuff, so that's my revenge for that 72hospc where I ridiculed myself lol.

Edit: no, the pitch mod is cancelled finally. But I'll re-try it elsewhere until I pull it out!

Harvest November:

A very nice unsampled version since no instrument is missing here really. Couldn't have completed it without the latest vgmtrans either. I recently decided to make this exclusive for a project, so I won't release the txt as of now.

Political Pressure:

This is just the perfect track for tense atmospheres and I could not believe it is not ported to SMWC, so here it is. The unsampled version sounds kinda funny but I made it my habit to replace anything choir by some @13 ADSR. Those samples gave me the idea to re-sample this other song from Secret of Mana.

Raven:

The 1:1 version was very fun to do. On the unsampled version, it was a bit tricky since there is only one marimba in SMW samples, as @3, but the song had one marimba and one kind of xylophone, so, after trying something with wood blocks, and it was ugly, I just settled for a slightly different ADSR of @3.

Another Medium:

comment: I am glad I found an arrangement for this since ther's no midi extractor for Undertale. I chose this one because it seemed well organized and had percussions. In the end, I became a bit too overwhelmed by the fact there were so many melody lines coming with their lower octave counterpart, so I tried to arrange something with musicalman's octaved samples. Somehow I managed to cram everything in, along with some writing weirdness. Since the txt is so weirdly done, I leave a filebin link here in case the submission gets rejected and I cannot fix it. I'll also leave the midi for anyone wanting to try it, too.

Sounds good, but Distant Thunder Trials of Mana version's snare drum is not noticeable. It looks like the ADSR bar (red bar in SPCPlay) is dropping too quickly to a low point, it should be at the highest point at all times (or if that's too much, drop gradually)

thanks brickblock. I've acted on this snare issue, it is updated in op.

I've never been into Undertale at all aside for listening to the occasionally bit of music found within its OST.
One of my favourite tracks is Another Medium so its always great to hear others take on porting it in some way. I quite like how its turned out and the fact it can suit so many different environments.

Nice Work.

Very nice work! Always love seeing appreciation for SNES RPG music, and those are all solidly done. Also cool idea to port an SoM song with samples from ToM.

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Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!

Thanks RPG Hacker, UPdudes, Sariel, thanks also to all the discord friends who commented the early versions and helped along the process.

Thread update, the original post is completely re-vamped for clearer communication.

Even if you don't have as much to share as you planned, thank you for these ports qantuum. I've always been a fan of the Mana series and these ports are a pleasure to listen to, sampled as well unsampled.
Good job and keep going like this.

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so somebody beat me on the another medium port... don't worry though, mine will be done this year, i promise

Great job with these ports, you're improving very fast with the porting stuff. Keep up with the good work.

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Finally some good effing criticism, I was afraid I would look too self-deprecative or so but it's just the truth :p But I try to own those flaws. And to progress. Not sure if I'll be able to fix Frenzy though, especially on the pitch modulation, it turned into a nightmare for a few attempts and I settled for this. Volume of percs is more manageable. And the tamborine is a sample from musicalman

Other than that I want to thank my new senpais Ultima, Anorakun and Torchkas for noticing me, it gets me going.

After Anorakun's comment I wanted to share some new meme I've done, the 3 pillars of the port. And to say, I am still not satisfied on my learning rate. Indeed all of these results took hard work of me crushing my brain and squinting my eyes on those stuff like crazy for hours on end. My relatives find me too introverted at family reunions because I can't share that, and on the other hand I keep skipping leg day because there's only so little time available. I just wish my job didn't obliterate dozens of hours every week lol.





The sequencial nature of mml writing makes it so extremely difficult for me to think vertically, to think polyphony. But I have to try.

One day I could make cool ear-picks of my favourite artists. I already have done a Joe Hisaishi one after all :o
Ear-picking is just so vital to me since a lot of stuff I listen to and love never gets arranged, so someone has to do take responsibility. Hey if you are still there reading, just check this song out, isn't it wonderful and whomesome???

Nah I don't take critic personally, I take it as something genuine that enables progress! Therefore you would be surprised at how I won't at all let go of my pitch modulation but instead do some more attempts. Man I just want almost the same electric guitar as in Trials is it too much to ask to SMW samples :c

Oh hey you got some cool material here. I'd particularly echo Ultima's and brickblock's feedback, and wanna add that a slower attack for the @13 would get it closer to a choir sound in Political Pressure; but again, all these are very nicely cute, great work!!

Also, Another Medium!!!! That one might be my favorite track out of Undertale's OST so it's cool to have an arrangement of it. I've made an attempt to port it a while back but it didn't turn out as good as I expected given my skill level at that time, and seeing this now sorta encourages me to get back into it haha

Thanks a lot Von Farenheit and Teows.

And with that the offered changes have been applied to Frenzy and Political Pressure unsampled.

Sorry for the double post, I just wanted to mention the big updates:

- Frenzy's pitch mod is lost for good, sad but moderation says it really didn't add anything to the track.
- I improved the tuning of Tyran Castle, so now it should be much more palatable. Still those #6 and #7 to do and pitch bends to re-assess.