What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse
Fourteen Black Dahlia Murder covers played strictly on the NES's 2A03 sound chip. Two pulses, a triangle, noise and DPCM drums, rendered from real NSF code by viper.
// The cartridge build: every track and the cover art on one UNROM ROM. A next, B previous, Select for the track list. Runs in jsnes here, or on a flash cart.
Melodic death metal doesn’t fit on a Nintendo. This album makes it anyway: fourteen songs from The Black Dahlia Murder’s catalogue, Paint It Black included, each squeezed onto the five channels of the NES’s 2A03 sound chip with nothing added afterwards. No soft synths and no reamping; every note comes out of an emulated APU running real 6502 code.
How it’s made
Each cover has a small map file that says how the band lands on the chip: which guitar gets which pulse channel, where the solo goes, and which parts fill in when the lead rests. viper turns that into a .vip song, compiles that to an NSF with a custom ca65 sound driver, and renders the NSF through a cycle-accurate APU core. The MP3s here are those renders, normalised and nothing else.
| Channel | Usually plays |
|---|---|
| Pulse 1 | lead guitar, solos |
| Pulse 2 | rhythm guitar, harmonies, fills |
| Triangle | bass |
| Noise | hats, cymbals |
| DPCM | kick and snare samples |
The hard parts are the songs themselves: tempo changes carried through to the driver, 3/2 and 6/4 sections, triplets mixed into straight sixteenths, and two-guitar parts that have to share one channel without losing the riff.
The same build also produces a cartridge ROM with every track and the cover art. It’s playable above in an emulator, and the .nes file runs on a flash cart on real hardware.
