I friggin love Famitracker covers. Something like 10 years ago I put together a playlist of more than 100 Famitracker covers and would listen to it while walking around and on the bus etc.
I’m specifically a fan of the NES’s base sound chip, the 2A03. Two square wave channels, one triangle, one noise, and DPCM to play 1 bit samples. Later games would include special chips in them like the MMC5 of VRC6 to increase the capabilities of the NES, but most games by and large just stuck with the 2A03. It is the NES sound to me.
I specifically like when people use the 2A03 to cover either real songs or more modern VG songs using that chip. So here are some of my favorites:
^^^this one in particular is incredible, listen to the way they change the width on the square wave to mimic the particular sounds for each syllable of the lyrics
^^^this one is a cover of a song already on the 2A03 which is pretty funny. it sounds great.
^^^there is a project that covers the whole sonic soundtrack using the 2A03 and this one is just my favorite. they’re all worth listening to though
^^^this one’s cheating, it’s using just the 2A03 at the beginning, then switches to using the additional channels provided by the MMC5 chip. It’s a clever trick!
^^^the title of this mentions the 2A07 which I just now learned is the PAL version of the 2A03. It doesn’t look like it has any additional sound capacities though. This one is incredibly impressive.
^^^This one is extremely funny. Someone who now goes by symfonikev would make these Megaman sounding songs in FLStudio — and they sound great! But to the discerning ear they are clearly not reproducible on a real NES. So someone went ahead and just made it in Famitracker.
I have a lot of these so I’ll stop there. Next time I’ll share some VRC6 covers and maybe learn what the hell the VRC6 even is.
If you want to find more of these, Youtube has shitloads. Just look up Famitracker cover of and then something you want to find. I bet you’ll find more than you think you will. post your favs
