Star Cruiser Main Theme

for YM2612 + SN76489

by MetallicOrwell

I'm quite enjoying making these simpler covers for a change, so here's another. Star Cruiser's main theme has been one of my favorite pieces of music on the Mega Drive really since I discovered the game, which would've been about 14 years ago. The game itself remains surprisingly playable for such an early 3D game (circa 1990), and there's an English translation floating around the interwebs, so I'd recommend checking it out. Anyhow, this theme plays during the rather long intro, and it's got an epic, slightly melancholic feel to it. Sometimes I'd let it play all the way while enjoying the glow of my CRT TV and my Japanese Mega Drive--but now I'm just flexing. Let's do the usual and dissect this thing.

Star Cruiser's main theme is a very well composed piece of music, I'd think. It maintains a coherent mood throughout, but there are lots of details to change it up and keep it interesting for two entire minutes. It's quite fitting for an intro where you're shown your spaceship flying across the universe as a text crawl explains the story (something about aliens and space politics--you know, it was the 80s). The instruments are an interesting choice: you essentially have FM patches that mimic square waves and a very simple brassy synth lead, as well as an aggressive synth bass. This means the repeating melodies with alternating pedal points (I learn new music terms every day, or invent them if they don't exist) sync up very well with the SN76489's own, pure square wave channels, and it creates a very effective echo / reverb effect. The downside is that the timbre is very simple. As for the brassy instrument, it sounds exactly like what you'd expect from an early Mega Drive game: serviceable enough, but also simplistic enough that it might as well be an OPL instrument.

One interesting thing is that Star Cruiser features software mixing on the YM2612's PCM channel. If you're a whacked-out, glasses-and-bowtie nerd, you might have heard about Street Fighter II Special Champion Edition doing that--but that was 1993, and this is 1990--much earlier, and therefore more impressive. Back then some people couldn't even do basic PCM sample playback without having to mute everything else first (I'm looking straight at Tecnosoft here). In this particular piece of music they can have the kick and snare drum play in the same channel as the hi-hats. The downside is that the quality suffers, but the upside is that they can use all three square wave channels; they don't have to sacrifice the third so the noise channel can do the hi-hats. Man, they really do love their square waves and their echo, huh? Well, the way I designed the sound here is quite different, so sue me.

Let's talk about the instruments first. We have several pianos: obviously, the electric piano from YU-NO (PC-98, OPNA) sees some heavy use here, as it's one of my favorite FM instruments ever. But there's also a "double piano" for use with extended channel three. That's right, I'm using that mode, and the double piano instrument means I get two voices out of a single channel. Obviously they're simpler in timbre, but they're still useful. For the lead melodies there are three instruments: a square/saw synth I originally made for Venus Fire back in December of 2025, my trusty "trumpet synth" and MO's DoctorSolo. Both the piano instruments as well as my synth leads are much more complex in timbre than the instruments used in the original version of the piece, and that's the direction I wanted to take this in: a thick, rich sound that's still very echo-y. In fact, the square waves of the SN76489 are used as support only, either to play the same melodies as the pianos one octave down, or to do the detuned echoes. There are lots of those, as you might expect.

One of the best ways to thicken a piece's sound, I find, is to include backing strings, so that's what I did. Because of the way I allocated my channels (and also thanks to extended channel 3 mode) I had a free channel, so I filled it with two different versions of my string ensemble, as well as a modified Sakimoto choir from Master of Monsters depending on the situation. The choir in particular goes very well with my DoctorSolo instrument, and it creates a somewhat ethereal, dreamy sound that's still aggressive enough to function as the piece's lead melody in the sections where it's used. The bass guitar is a more realistic, fingered bass I pilfered from a SilverRIFF .fur file a while back.

While making this cover, I reflected upon what my overall approach to FM synthesis is, regardless of my specialties (metal and orchestra). I've realized I try to make things sound realistic in the sense of "MIDI being played on a really good SoundFont". Just to make things clear, if you're listening to my cover of Star Cruiser right now, you're NOT hearing a MIDI file being played on a SoundFont--it's a Furnace tracker sequence and I designed the sound myself. Anyhow, a lot of music made with FM synthesis from this era (circa 1990) sounds very synth-y and not at all realistic. I doubt that was a stylistic choice, though it could've been in *some* cases. They probably didn't have the tools or the know-how needed to make the Mega Drive sound as good as the modern chiptune scene can make it sound, so there's a pretty big gap in quality here. In my case, again, I generally make my instruments so they resemble real ones, and even when I'm making synth leads, they sound quite clean; they're inspired by what you'd hear in a S.S.H. song, for example.

As for the percussion, the SN76489's noise channel is used for hi-hats, and the samples are from all over the place. The kick drum is still from the Arachno Soundfont power kit, because it's the best I've ever found. The snare drum is the one I've been using since The Cold Shade Of Night, and it's supposed to be from the Yamaha MU-2000. Let me explain: I got it from a clean section on one of S.S.H.'s tracks...or did I? It's not a clean snare sample, because it's got a long hi-hat and maybe a tom layered on top of it, I think. It's a mess, but I really like how it sounds. The confusion happened because a few days ago, TheWeekendRacer provided me with some samples from his Yamaha MU-2000 EX's power kit, and none of them sound like the one I ripped myself. That sounded like a casual statement, but yes, I did in fact obtain samples from the legendary sound module used by Saitama Saisyu Heiki in the early 2000s, drums and lead guitar--truly a momentous occasion. But I digress. The toms are not from the Arachno Soundfont this time, they're the ones I got from TheWeekendRacer.

That about covers it all. I should get back to Star Cruiser, that save file's been sitting there for about a year, probably. See you around.

 

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