Castlevania (OPL2 Redone)

[MelonadeM]

It's really no secret that the official DOS port of Castlevania has a pretty godawful OPL2 soundtrack. Well 3 years ago, I thought "what if it actually sounded decent?", so I went ahead and did just that.

I tried to keep a game in mind, like as if this were to be used in an actual conversion - limiting myself to 7 channels for most of the songs, leaving 2 for sound effects. Some songs do use all 9 but it's mostly jingles, where there wouldn't be SFX playing anyway.

Even 3 years later I'm still decently happy with these, certainly I'd do things differently now that there's more tools that support the OPL2 and OPL3 (namely OpenMPT Tracker - I used AdlibTracker for these conversions here) but yeah. I honestly didn't really think to post it here at all, but I've just noticed there's a new OPL3 emulation core, NukedOPL3, and all of these sound significantly different to me (compared to the default emulation core, which I think is AdLibEmu). Well, I certainly hope you enjoy these. Maybe I'll do another project like this, who knows.

Sidenote: the VGMs claim they're YMF262 OPL3, however I limited myself to OPL2 features only. I couldn't find a way to convert the VGMs to OPL2, or to force AdlibTracker in an OPL2 mode...

[RandomName]

Nicely done. These renditions are much better than the originals.

[MelonadeM]

Thank you, RandomName - I really appreciate that!

[RetroMasterVGM]

Can you tell me how can I import those instruments to OPM?. I tried to use vgm2opm and the results is useless, also, I don't know which sound chip uses OPL2, I tried to mute all channels in Winamp one per one, but the song sounds with all channels.

[MelonadeM]

I don't know of any way to convert OPL2 instruments to OPM - they're two completely different architectures.

You'll need to use the OPL3/YMF262 tab to mute channels, as I couldn't figure out a way to export/convert to OPL2 from AdlibTracker at the time (still within OPL2 limitations waveform wise and channel count wise, so anything from OPL3 channel 10 onward is not used)

[cmccaff1]

Absolute quality...true OPL2 goodness.
Yamashita-san would be proud to hear these covers, I have no doubt of it.
Thank you for sharing them with us!