StarTropics music glitch fixed after 25 years

The bass is finally picked up

There’s a sub-community of emulation fans out there dedicated to disassembling and modifying the arcane code of yesteryear’s classics. Brad Smith, a.k.a. rainwarrior, is one such individual, who after hearing the errors in two music tracks of Nintendo’s classic island adventure, StarTropics, took it upon himself to right the coding errors that are almost as old as I am. It seems like it requires quite a bit of knowledge on how the NES processes audio and in the video he details the process he went through to isolate and correct the bugs present in each track.

What ever happened to the StarTropics series anyway? They were fun games, and a great alternative to The Legend of Zelda series, with a bit of the modern quirkiness that has proved a cult classic with the Mother series. Was it because Nintendo designed them as a North American and PAL exclusive and they were forgotten by Japanese management, or simply the less than stellar reception the second entry in the series received because it was released at the end of the NES’s development cycle?

Hopefully before long, with Nintendo sticking its neck out and trying new things with both new and established IPs, we’ll get to take another trip to C-Island.

StarTropic’s Broken Music [The Punk Effect]