How To Recreate/Restore a Full Game Boy Advance Soundtrack in High Quality
A new subfield of video game music has recently emerged: some people call it music "restoration" (or recreation). It comes from the desire to preserve and share incredible soundtracks that were cursed by hardware limitations at the time they were composed. For instance, the Game Boy Advance was using sequenced music, associated with sound samples. Those sounds had to be heavily compressed so everything fits on a 8Mb cartridge, and the audio engine had limited processing power, low sample rate, cheap output speakers...
In this talk, I would like to detail how I restored the entirety of the soundtrack from the first two Golden Sun games (2001-2002), by tracking down the original hardware that was used to record the samples, extracting the midi sequences, carefully studying the subtleties for each instrument, applying modern mixing techniques, and even doing a bit of reverse engineering. The whole process was improved by creating python scripts and a custom VST in C++.
Vincent Dortel
Senior audio programmer
Freelance
Vincent is an audio programmer with 12 years experience in the video game industry, he worked for several studios such as Quantic Dream, Rocksteady, Ubisoft and Microsoft. He's now a freelancer, which allows him to split his time between contractor work for game studios and personal projects. He likes to combine his passion for music and games with his programming skills to tackle fun challenges. Sometimes he secretly develops VST plugins when no one's looking.