About

Retronome is the precursor to 8BITar Hero. It was developed in one week in Flash using Actionscript 3.0. The idea? Take all of the things nerds love (video games, video games that give nerds the illusion that they are sexy rock stars) and to smash them together forcibly into a game that lets you play classic Nintendo video game songs in a Guitar Hero-esque fashion. The original idea was to procedurally generate levels from NSF files — essentially, NES music that’s been ripped from NES roms — which would allow the player to play along with almost any song from any NES game ever. As is the case with lofty ideas and proving pretty cool concepts, the actual finished product only really did half of these things, and when I say “did” I really mean “sort of did.” Because I was working in Flash (with Actionscript 3.0 — the more socially accepted version of Actionscript (if the social circle you are trying to penetrate is a circle of programmers [which is to say, not a very “social” circle at all]) — it was nearly impossible for me to use raw NSF files, as that would require me to write, essentially, a NES emulator in Flash. Instead, I used a handy tool called NSF2MID to convert certain songs from certain NSF files into midi files, which could be read in Flash using some libraries I found. This, of course, is not really what I wanted to do (or at least, was only half of what I wanted to do).

Track List

1.  BOMBERMAN 2 SONG     – Bomberman 2 – Level
2.  BUBBLE BOBBLE SONG   – Bubble Bobble – Level
3.  DR. MARIO SONG       – Dr. Mario – Fever
4.  FINAL FANTASY SONG A – Final Fantasy 1 – Title
5.  FINAL FANTASY SONG B – Final Fantasy 1 – Battle
6.  KID ICARUS SONG      – Kid Icarus – Underworld
7.  MAPPY SONG           – Mappy – Level
8.  MARIO SONG A         – Super Mario Bros 1 – Overworld
9.  MARIO SONG B         – Super Mario Bros 1 – Underground
10. MARIO 2 SONG         – Super Mario Bros 2 – Overworld
11. MARIO 3 SONG         – Super Mario Bros 3 – Overworld 2 (i think)
12. MEGAMAN 2 SONG       – Megaman 2 – Title
13. METROID SONG         – Metroid
14. MOTHER SONG A        – Mother/Earthbound 0 – Title
15. MOTHER SONG B        – Mother/Earthbound 0 – New Age Retro Hippie Battle Song
16. MOTHER SONG C        – Mother/Earthbound 0 – Overworld
17. TETRIS SONG          – Tetris – Level
18. ZELDA SONG           – The Legend of Zelda – Overworld
19. ZELDA SONG           – The Legend of Zelda 2 – Battle