Route 113 [8-bit VSU+GB] | Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald

Route 113 is one of favorite songs in the Pokémon series, and out of every song I've ever arranged, this one was always on the back of my mind as something I wanted to eventually tackle again one day. The problem wasn't that it literally can't sound good on the GameBoy, but that it's so compromised that it sounds just a bit off. Hence, when Project Atlantis started becoming more than a passing fad, this was the first song I tried to arrange. And well, I had to do some fairly out of the box thinking to get this to a nice place. First, the "bassline" was a serious problem. It has a lot of triplets, so I eventually just copied it straight from my old GB version instead of arranging it from scratch. It goes up, and then has a downwards descent than pans from left to right. The problem here is that there is exactly 1 note in this upwards sequence that is below the floor of the VSU's frequency (it's a D2, when the VSU only gets down to a D#2). For a long time I had the bass on the Pulse 2 and used the limited GB panning just like the original version, but that was just a bit of a waste when the VSU has 16 panning levels. But then I hit a stroke of genius—I just used the Pulse 2 for that note that it's beyond the VSU's range, and the rest it played as normal. This part isn't panned, so I didn't have to worry about any funkiness there. You can see this if you pay attention to the Pulse 2 view, which is silent for 99% of the song. The trumpts were a problem, as expected. Directly sampling them resulted in garbage, so I ended up using a synthetic wave that sounds vaguely trumpety. The same is true of the timpani, my nemesis. I ended up choosing something fairly "okay" and just accepted I'll never be able to have proper timpani in this. Finally, a quick mention to a modification of the original song: during Part B, the original just has one melody track, but I decided to double it on the VSU #2 an octave lower just to fill in that space a bit more. Overall, I think it sounds pretty good, but I'm resisting the urge to keep tinkering with it ad eternum and just release the current version. Links: https://tritehexagon.carrd.co/#chiptunes