This is a story from the old days before we had YouTube or the bandwidth to stream audio.

Back then, if you wanted to listen to music from a video game, maybe you could track down an official soundtrack CD—or, if you were a mega nerd like me, you’d download ripped chiptunes and their special players. These files are basically cut-down versions of the original game data, containing the game’s music data and its original player; it’s intended to be paired with a special audio player which is essentially a cut-down emulator for the console which emulates the CPU and sound chip but not the rest of the hardware. Since they stripped out anything the game didn’t need to play the music, they were usually tiny. Entire soundtracks for 8-bit and 16-bit games could easily fit in under 50KB¹, which made it easy for me to sample stuff on a whim even with a dialup internet connection.

For me, these were a great way to try out the music to games I’d read about but never actually played. It was especially great for those legendary games I’d heard about that used weird hardware and that I’d never have gotten to try on their original systems. There’s one game in particular that fascinated me: Konami’s Lagrange Point. It was one of a set of NES games that were famous in the early emulation scene for using the “expansion audio” feature of the Famicom, the Japanese version of the system. This allowed game cartridges to include extra audio hardware which games could use simultaneously with the builtin chip for richer and much more complex music. This feature was missing from international versions of the NES, and until emulation most people outside Japan had only heard rumours about what games like Castlevania III had actually sounded like in their original versions.

Lagrange Point had an especially mystical reputation for being the only NES game using Konami’s VRC7 sound chip², which was much more advanced than anything else on the system. It used a sound chip using entirely different technology from every other NES game; its Yamaha YM2413 is an FM synthesis chip closer to the 16-bit Sega Genesis than anything that anything else used on the NES³, and I just had to hear what that sounded like for myself. Here, click play and take a listen to the first track for yourself:

It’s a nice sound, isn’t it? It’s surreal to me hearing sound like this coming out of an NES game that feels like it should have much more primitive instruments.

That said, when I grabbed an .NSF rip of the game and popped it in the first player I could find that did VRC7 audio, that’s not what I heard. What I heard was this:

That’s not really the same at all, is it? Those sound like different instruments entirely, something closer to a “normal” NES instrument sound than the warm smooth instruments the game is meant to use. That scratchiness in particular has always stuck with me; it gives the game a very distinctive broken-down sound with a texture completely unlike the original game’s sound at all. Maybe this is the nostalgia talking, but I liked the sound at the time and I like it now. No one meant for it to sound this way, but I enjoy it all the same.

Fast forward about 25 years. I still use these custom players and ripped game audio today and happened to dig out the Lagrange Point NSF. It didn’t sound anything like the incorrect version I’d imprinted on, so I thought I’d hunt down that old player and take a listen again just to see if it was like I remembered. There was just one problem:

I’d forgotten what player it was.

I wasn’t going to be able to listen to the broken-down chiptunes of my dreams if I didn’t have the right player! Thus started my desperate hunt to see if I could figure out what it was.

I had the vague memory that it was a player called Meridian Advance, which was released back in 2001, but it definitely wasn’t that. It doesn’t have VRC7 support at all, so trying to play it back just got me silence and the very occasional sound it was playing from the regular NES sound chip.

If my one memory was out, what was it? I started digging through every NSF player I could find from the late 90s through the early 00s, hoping one of them would be the right one. BNSF? No VRC7 support at all. NEZplug? Plays normally. NSFten for Winamp? No VRC7. NotSo Fatso? Plays normally. Bleep? NESamp? Nosefart⁴? G-NSF? SlickNSF? MSP? Meridian Prime? No, no, no, no, no, no, and no. It’s a hell of a list, and as I kept failing to find what I was looking for I started to wonder if I’d imagined the whole thing.

Finally, I thought of something I should probably have considered in the first place. “Meridian Advance” implies it’s the second Meridian, doesn’t it? Just like the Game Boy Advance? Well, yes: Meridian Advance was the second of three Meridian sound players which started development after the developer lost the source code to the original Meridian in a hard drive crash⁵. I naively assumed that Meridian Advance could do everything the original could do, but that was a bad assumption. The original Meridian from 2000 really did have VRC7 support, and it was exactly the broken sound I remembered. Here it is:

(Yes, cloning Winamp was the most actual thing an audio player could do back then.) It runs fine under Wine so I gave it a shot and it really does sound exactly like I remember it.

Want to hear it yourself? You can download Meridian right here, and the Lagrange Point NSF here; should work fine on modern Windows or under Wine for Mac/Linux.