Beepy-Kabloopie: A Banjo-Kazooie Chiptune Album
I made a chiptune cover album of the music from Banjo-Kazooie!
Why?
I like the game’s soundtrack and thought it would work well when adapted to the limits of the Nintendo Entertainment System.
How?
Old game music from the 80s was sometimes done using a sort of programming language called a “music macro language” (MML). Musicians would compose the tunes, and programmers would transcribe the tunes into MML, which then gets compiled down to code that plays the music with the correct timing when run. This reduced the overhead needed to code a music engine or have the games parse and interpret song data in real-time using something like MIDI. One can think of MML as a kind of low-level (in the sense of abstraction) programming language for music on game consoles powered by microcontrollers.
I have the source code for the project on my GitHub — along with a few other songs!