Double Dragon II: The Revenge

[Generator]
  MAME 0.164 mod by Valley Bell

The sequel to the classic "Double Dragon" sees
the Lee Brothers out for revenge, as the
ganglord Machine Gun Willy, rather than
kidnapping her again like so many video game
villains, has gunned down their friend Marian
in cold blood!

It improves on the original game in many ways,
not the least of which is the music. Kazunaka
Yamane has clearly become more comfortable with
the YM2151 and has used it to deliver a
hard-hitting soundtrack with nothing but FM
synths, free to use every channel since the
game's sound effects are the domain of the OKI
M6295 chip. It even gets experimental with the
final fight of the game, with music that shows
things are getting creepy. In particular, it
starts with a 4-minute ambient track worthy of
a horror game--which makes it all the more
perplexing that it's that long when you only
hear 10 _seconds_ of it in-game! Perhaps it was
felt to be too much for a beat-'em-up's final
fight, and the second, shorter song was then
written for the fight itself.

There are more oddities than just the music,
however, at least on the technical side. For
instance, tracks 03 and 09 last longer than you
think they would because the percussion tracks
are not the same length as the others. I set a
loop mod so they end after the first loop, so
they don't last too long for comfort.

The other, more serious oddity is that track 10
is hit by a programming glitch in the original
game, where the tracks in channels 1, 4 and 8
appear not to be set to properly loop, and so
they cut out after a few minutes. I trimmed the
song so that it loops as intended, but I also
included a version outside the playlist file
that loops as it does in the game, dropped
channels and all.

Finally, unlike the original Double Dragon,
this game never got a soundtrack release. The
only one out there is for the NES version of
the game, and it's an arranged soundtrack with
no involvement from Technos Japan Corp. apart
from music licensing. I therefore named each
song according to where it is used.

Don't let any of that stop you, however, as the
soundtrack is great listening overall! Drop it
in your VGM player of choice and enjoy!

(Special thanks to ctr_ and GTheGuardian for
 helping me with debugging the game in MAME to
 get an improvised sound test working!)


Size reduction:
1. vgm_sro: 6.42 MB -> 1.92 MB (29.9 %)
2. vgm_cmp: 1.92 MB -> 573 KB (29.8 %)
3. gzip: 573 KB -> 97.6 KB (17.0 %)
Total: 6.42 MB -> 97.6 KB (1.52 %)

— The Golden Horse

Source: VGMRips