Seriously, I didn't realize this until it was pointed out to me in one of Silver X's snazzy documents...

This throws a decent-sized wrench into my plans for Ghetto Warrior, which would ostensibly replace the soundtrack with popular rap tunes. As rap tends to be very beat-driven, the question is thus begged: how much ASMing are we looking at here?

Adding onto a music engine is no easy task.  Noise channel in paticular is kind of funky to work with, since just playing 'tones' with it doesn't really sound like anything -- you have to form frequency and envelope patterns for it to sound like anything resembling drums.


Expanding, on the other hand, is quite easy.  So if space is an issue, that can be overcome easily.  There's even enough free space in the fixed bank for a custom swap routine so you can get to the pages you add (looks like chunks of FF at offset 0x0FF60 are good to use, as well as the "DRAGON WARRIOR" ascii text)

That's what I was thinking on the way to the pharmacy the other night... There *are* percussion-like sound effects within the game. The stairs/exiting town sound mentioned by Tomaitheous, which could be considered a low-pitched kick drum; the sound made when you strike an enemy (pseudo-snare); the "Excellent Move!" sound effect, which sounds like three hihat hits; etc.

Since the game already contains percussion sounds, that's half the battle won right there. I reason it's now just a matter of retooling the music engine to recognize and apply such sounds to the in-game music (and, of course, putting said parts into the individual song programs).

Somehow, I doubt this will be as easy as making SMB1 play percussion in the Underground and Dungeon levels...