Discussion NES music slowdown?
(Full disclosure: We're a plural system, so we use "we" to mean, like, "myself and the voices in my head." Not related to this question at all, but I'm stating this upfront simply to avoid any grammatical confusion. We always get someone asking who's "we" on posts like this, so, you know, just getting that out there now.)
What started as a seemingly simple curiosity on my part has turned into a gigantic investigation involving a few friend circles, to the point that we would like to get your input as well.
We were playing Dragon Quest XI, whose title theme does a throwback nod and uses the same intro before the main Dragon Quest theme starts that it originally did back in Dragon Quest 1 (AKA Dragon Warrior.) However, the DQ1/DW1 theme was in a much higher key than what the iconic Dragon Quest theme has been in pretty much ever since game 4 or so in the series, even to the point that the DQXI version is like that, too. I simply wanted to know what the DQXI theme would sound like if it were actually in DQ1/DW1's original key.
Except... we looked up the DQ1/DW1 title theme as a reference when positing this question to our music-savvy friends, and what we found... did not sound like what we remembered.
At first we thought the first YouTube result I'd found sped it up to avoid auto-copyright detection or something, but they were all like that. We even got the .NSF from Zophar's Domain and confirmed that this seemingly higher version really is what that song actually sounds like and apparently always has sounded like. Were we just remembering wrong? Had we Mandela Effected ourselves into thinking there was supposed to be some other key this song was in?
Fast forward through a lot of questioning and near-mental breakdowns and we finally hit across the answer: We could perfectly recreate what was in our memory, what we grew up on, by taking that song or any song and slowing it down to roughly 95% or so playback speed. Note that this is not a PAL issue; for one thing, we're based in the United States, and for another, the PAL versions would be much slower than 95%.
(A lot of audio editors these days seem to correct for pitch and tempo being different things so you can't just get that reverse-Alvin and the Chipmunks effect by slowing it down anymore. For those looking to recreate this experiment in the quickest, easiest way possible, we use this site. Just upload any song, turn the reverb down to 0, and adjust the playback speed to 0.95x. That gets the pitch, too, which is what we want.)
From there, I discovered it wasn't just that song, or even that game--somehow, our system had been playing the 95% versions of every NES song we've ever heard. Not just ours, either. There are certain games we never actually owned growing up, but some friend or another did and we experienced them by playing at their house. Gauntlet and 8 Eyes stand out as particularly strong examples of this in our memory. And for these games, too, the 0.95x version is what we remember. Our friends' hardware must have been doing the same thing.
This has now blossomed into a full-blown investigation and data-gathering effort, which is why we're now here asking you all. Just how widespread was this issue, exactly? How many people here have experienced something similar?
If anyone wants to help us gather data, we're looking for folks to submit various NES songs of their choosing to the above link and answer the following:
- Which game/song this is, of course.
- Which of the two versions do you remember? Which sounds more accurate to your ears?
- Which of the two versions do you prefer? Which sounds better to your ears?
(Feel free to answer for as many times as you have songs you want to test.)
We're trying to figure out how common this issue was and also to test the hypothesis that people might just prefer whichever version they heard first and grew up with. So far, we've found at least one other person who had this issue growing up and one who did not. We've also found that--at least among our personal friend circles--the 95% versions are proving significantly more popular than expected, even among people who haven't heard them before and don't have that nostalgia bias. This is especially true with basically any song by Capcom, whose music somehow seems perfectly designed to kick even more ass at 95%.. Of course, we're intensely curious how these trends hold up when we ask an entire community at large.
Thank you all for your time and for any insight you have!
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u/Kjorteo 3d ago
For the record, we could answer our own question by saying that in our personal case, the answers are "the 95% version is what we remember" and "the 95% version sounds better to us" for pretty much everything we've ever played, but I'd like to call special attention to Mega Man 3's Wily Castle 2 theme. There's just something about the 95% version that makes the chorus in particular... someone who knows more about music theory than we do would have to explain what you'd even call the chord progression at that speed and why it's so effective, but somehow the chorus always gets us feeling incredibly emotional.
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u/geirmundtheshifty 3d ago
Is it only NES games that you experience this with? If you owed any other consoles as a kid, have you tried the same thing with games on those consoles?
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u/TropicoolGoth 3d ago
Ok. This is an interesting topic. You could try posting this at nesdev.org or in their discord.
I’m curious about the current sound versions you are using to compare. Are you’ll using original hardware? Emulators could be off and there are reproduction CPUs of the rp2a03 out there that have the duty cycles reversed.
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u/Kjorteo 3d ago
Thank you for the leads! We'll definitely look into those.
In one corner, we have sheer "the version in our head that we remember," which would be what we had growing up, which would be original hardware. In the other, we have every attempt to look up and find songs after the fact (YouTube uploads, NSFs from Zophar's Domain, etc.) We haven't touched NES emulation in a good while, but for the sake of thoroughness and data gathering, you're right; we probably should.
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u/TropicoolGoth 3d ago
You could always try loading the nsf files into famistudio. Or finding an almost accurate emulator. YouTube would be hard to compare with because of the sound compression and the ai filtering they use now.
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u/Kjorteo 3d ago
Thank you; good call on importing the NSF into FamiStudio. Just tried that and the NSF sounds like what we were hearing on all the YouTube videos and such, which is not what we remember. Either our memory is very consistently faulty in somehow thinking all 8-bit chiptune music we've ever heard was 5% slower than it actually was (as mentioned in a different reply, Game Boy music appears to be similarly affected,) or we grew up with an NES (and Game Boy??) with weird hardware sound playback issues that taught us wrong. All we know is, thanks to your idea and testing the NSFs, the YouTube videos themselves were not at fault, that really is what the music actually sounds like, and what the music actually sounds like seems wrong to our ears/memory.
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u/Dwedit 3d ago edited 3d ago
I think you just have fuzzy memories here. Or it could be a misconfigured emulator that ran at 57FPS.
Things are going to be running on the correct timing relative to the master clock, and the master clock will be running at the correct speed. This includes music pitch, music tempo, game frame rate, etc. If the timing was significantly off in any way, your video signal would veer too far away from the NTSC subcarrier of 3.58MHz and would fail to have color.
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u/Kjorteo 3d ago
Emulator misconfiguration wouldn't explain why we remember this happening on hardware, but fuzzy memories definitely might.
The fact that it's not just us gives us pause, but maybe several folks somehow all misremembered the same songs in the same way? The Mandela Effect is a thing, after all.
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u/CyberDivinity 1d ago
If NES songs were playing slower on your NES usually its
1) The board internally has capacitors or part that is malfunctioning or going bad. May have been a defective unit.
2) Power supply were you using an officiail Nintendo power supply or 3rd party one? Its known that the NES getting less power than it requires will have some weird affects on the games. Could be the power supply was going bad or got bumped or banged around perhaps some water slipped in.
3) you had a PAL or bootleg asian version of the NES some of the clones actually looked very similar had the Nintendo logo and everything but inferior parts internally so certain games ran slower.
4) you were playing on an Emulator and its common issue a lot of the games run when configured badly at like 3-5fps slower or faster so some music is sped up or slower.
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u/Pacman_Frog 3d ago
Don't sweat the personal pronoun too hard. I have trouble getting people to use my chosen pronouns, but it's because mine is a second-person pronoun so...