Don’t ask me why I did this, but some time ago I found the BRR sample for that silly slap bass instrument used in early SNES games (you know, the bwoo bwoo bwoo one), and did a pattern search on the entire snesmusic.org archive for files containing a portion of it.
I remembered this sound as being kind of ubiquitous and inescapable on the system, but to my surprise, there weren’t as many matches as I thought there would be. 27 out of over 1500 SPC sets.
There were a few problems with my methodology:
- The sample could be in an SPC file (in SNES sound RAM) but never actually be used by a track.
- The sample could be modified slightly, still be recognizable as the bwoo bwoo bwoo we all love/hate, but still no direct match would be detected.
- Any SNES soundtrack that is incompatible with the SPC dump format (ie any game that uploads new audio data mid-track) won’t be in the snesmusic.org archive and therefore won’t be detected.
As an example: there is a slap bass sample in ActRaiser (Filmore) that sounds very similar, but didn’t count as a match. I’m not sure if it’s the same sample though. Paperboy 2 also seemed to dodge the list. Bwoo bwoo bwoo.
I could be missing significantly more, then. In any case, here is the list:
B.O.B. Darius Twin Dungeon Master Gan Gan Ganchan Genjuu Ryodan Gods Hit the Ice Hokuto no Ken 6 John Madden Football Magic Johnson's Super Slam Dunk Michael Jordan - Chaos in the Windy City Might and Magic 2 (Japanese Version) Mega Man X PGA Tour Golf Raiden Densetsu Shinseiki Odysselya Sonic Blastman Soul Blazer Spark World Super E.D.F. - Earth Defense Force Super F1 Hero (BWOO BWOO BWOO BWOO) Super Off Road Super Soccer Champ Vs. Collection Warlock World Class Rugby Xardion
And here’s a list of matches for the individual SPC files.
(e 19/Mar/2017: Wording)
