Video game music remixes

[geoboy]

By the way, that's a great site there, that last one, but I'm afraid it has all these alien formats I've never even heard of. What's an SPC for example? (First thing I went to was the Earthbound section...)

It's as though standardization is considered "evil"...

These formats ARE standards in the emulation community. They're not an officially-licensed-by-Nintendo kind of standard, but they're in formats most everyone in the emulation community has agreed to.

NSF is a Nintendo (NES) sound file. SPC is Super Nintendo music (named after the Yamaha SPC-700 music chip in the SNES). USF is Nintendo 64 sound, and so on. These files are the actual sound data captured from a game's ROM and emulated for playback. As a result, the files are very small and deliver completely true to the original sound. Well, as true to emulation takes it (which is pretty dang close). No Lossy compression, no artifacts, and consistent sound (which is not true for general MIDI).

There are a number of players of these formats as well as Winamp plug-ins. I'll find links to some later as I am in a bit of a hurry at the moment. But those music archive pages on Zophar usually have a link to players for those files. Also, some emulators like Nestopia and FCEUltra will play .nsf files too.

As for the legality of this, I've never heard of Nintendo or any other companies cracking down or shunning the distribution of the original game sound tracks in these emulated formats (and video game remixes for that matter). If they did, Zophar would not host these archives, since they don't host any full blown ROMs of commercial games for obvious legal reasons.