Cave Story SNES Soundtrack Mod

Hey everyone! You might have seen me on the modding Discord a few months ago, or on YouTube right after I finished working on this, but I thought I ought to make a proper post on here. This is a mod of the original release of Cave Story that changes every song into a Super NES/Sony SPC700 equivalent, using instruments from Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 6, Final Fantasy 5, Super Metroid, EarthBound, and plenty of other favorites of mine.
I tested each of these tracks in a standalone SPC player, exported them, and converted/looped them into the same .ogg format the Steam release uses. Special thanks to Clownacy, who created the DLL Mod Loader + ogg music mod. Without his advice, this would have just been a concept album and not playable in-game at all. Be sure to mess around with the options to enable/disable widescreen, 60fps, etc. as you see fit.

You can download a copy of the original game with the mod/ogg files already in place here!

If you want use this mod with the Steam release, you can download the standalone Ogg11 folder here.

If you just want to listen to the music by itself, you can download it for free here.

2021 EDIT: Fixed Google Drive's stupid broken link shenanigans. Everything should work again, let me know if it doesn't. Shoutouts to whoever just requested access lol

Spoiler: Cover Art

Front:

Back:

 

Nice to see you here, Vince! I've seen your stuff before, and I can't wait to hear your arrangements!

 

This looks very interesting! Another cool thing to do would be to simplify the bitmaps so it looks like a SNES too. Now, one thing. I recommend that you apply it to a fresh version of Cave Story instead. I know that the player can apply the hack to a fresh copy, but it would be all around more convenient to just patch it to a fresh copy and upload that in place of the one with the 4th ending mod. It makes it feel unofficial and it is just kinda a pain in the ass, you know?

May edit this once I've actually listened to it lol
(actually do this next time -DT)


Here's my review of the mod itself. There's not much to review here, but I'll do what I can.

Spoiler: Review

First impressions aren't wonderful. All of the highlighted items above are useless and/or dangerous to include in your mod. The Bandcamp link was a nice touch, though.
Also, OrgView? You aren't even using ORGs!



These settings are not optimal whatsoever. The recommended settings are:
Use Gamepad: False
Arrow keys = movement, Down-arrow = search: True
Z = jump, X= attack: True
Jump button = OK: True
Screen size: 640x480 Windowed



Conventionally, you'd delete the unused ones, but that really doesn't matter.



I would have recommended Clownacy's 3DS HUD hack for this. This is the end, because there is obviously no more original content (except for the music ofc).

Now, for the music. All the sounds are really nice, but the SFX and the music don't fit right. You might want to consider getting different SFX. Now, the music itself is great but sometimes the drums are too loud. It also sounds like a jazz festival sometimes. But, flaws aside, this is a great project! Keep up the good work!

P.S. A "thanks to" Hayden would be well appreciated because you did still use his mod.

 

Yep those files (yes, even OrgView) are just part of what's included in the English patch ZIP file, sorry about that :< And yeah, I had switched the jump and attack buttons in DoConfig. When I first played the game five years ago, I had some trouble due to muscle memory - on pretty much every NES emulator out there, X is jump and Z is run/attack.
RE: jazz - I'm not sure which song you mean here (I usually kept the note sequences accurate to the originals, only adjusting if they went over the SPC700's 8-channel limit), but the beauty of the ogg music functionality is that you can drop in whatever remixes you want! I should make a tutorial on how to properly loop and split wav files into oggs
And yeah, I've been playing through the fourth ending mod for the first time and just had it lying around. I've updated my post with a new link that leads to an untouched copy of the game with the mod in place and the extraneous files deleted.

 

RE: jazz - I'm not sure which song you mean here

A lot of the instruments sound too much like actual instruments, like saxophones at times in a lot of songs. Get Item and Gestation are some of the ones I noticed right off the bat.
All the rest is good to hear though

 

Yeah, all of the SNES games I'm drawing from use recordings of real instruments (or at least 90s synth modules doing their best impressions).

 

Yeah, all of the SNES games I'm drawing from use recordings of real instruments (or at least 90s synth modules doing their best impressions).

I see. Well, good job!

 

This is just beautiful. Honestly, Cave Story is my favourite game and my childhood and hearing these remixes brought a tear to my eye. Thank you so much for this!

 

Thank you I'm happy to share them here

 

This is just beautiful. Honestly, Cave Story is my favourite game and my childhood and hearing these remixes brought a tear to my eye. Thank you so much for this!

Oh, hey there! Welcome to the forums!

 

Yo, @vince94 you still got the XM files for this and are you willing to share them? Just wanna have some of the samples used here. They sound really good.

 

@Dippy0615 Yeah, I've been meaning to release them! Here's a zip file with everything.

 

Thanks!