Wild Matsu | Bad Apple but its VIDEO is ported to Famitracker @WildMatsu | Uploaded December 2022 | Updated October 2024, 1 day ago.
"Bad Apple!!" is originally the stage 3 theme from Touhou Gensoukyou: Lotus Land Story by ZUN, but it is probably better known for the arrangement "Bad Apple ft. Nomico" by Alstroemeria Records and the shadow art video made for it. The audio is an original 8-bit remix by me, mostly based on the Alstroemeria Records arrangement, for 2A03 + VRC6 + MMC5 + 4-N163 + FDS + S5B.

I've never used more than one expansion chip at a time before, but the project called for it; if I'm using 18 channels for the sake of cramming a video in there, it feels silly to not to have them play audio too. It also gave me a way to make my cover just a little bit different from many of the other covers already on YouTube (I went through dozens; only one was multichip and still used fewer chips than mine), when the need to sync my cover up with the visuals meant I couldn't alter the tempo or song structure at all. For this reason, I also decided to use the original melody in the second half.

There is one caveat worth mentioning: a song in Famitracker can only have 256 patterns. Since I'm using one pattern per frame, and way more than 256 frames, it was unavoidable to break it down into segments. For an uninterrupted viewing experience, I edited the segments together in post, and overlaid a raw export of the audio over it at the end. The whole thing easily fit into a single module, though.

One other minor thing is, because Famitracker centers the currently playing row, I had to make the Famitracker window very tall. The bottom was pretty much just empty space, though, so I cropped it out of the final video.

This module was made by using a Dxx effect to skip to the bottom row of each frame, which is where the actual musical commands are. Bad Apple ft. Nomico is at 138 BPM, and a [7,6] groove achieves an extremely close 138.46 BPM. This means the framerate is 9.6fps, which is not as high as I would have liked, but more wasn't really achievable. In theory, you can set the speed to 1 and achieve 60fps, but Famitracker simply isn't designed for video playback and therefore just won't render that many frames that fast—at least, not at the 160x120 resolution I'm using here.

This idea was inspired in part by pigdevil2010's port of Bad Apple to ImpulseTracker: youtube.com/watch?v=SDvk3aL78fI

Here are the modules, for DN-Famitracker 0.5.0.0. One contains the audio only, and the other includes the video. They are not compatible with previous versions of DN-Famitracker, or previous Famitracker forks. The Python script I used to generate the video module from the audio module and a folder full of video stills is available as well.

Repository with all files: github.com/wildmatsu/BadAppleFamitrackerConverter
Module with Video and Audio: http://wildmatsu.xyz/fami/BadAppleVideo.zip
Module with Audio Only: http://wildmatsu.xyz/fami/BadAppleAudio.dnm
Source Code (Archive): http://wildmatsu.xyz/fami/BAFTConverter.zip

Listen on SoundCloud: soundcloud.com/matsumuho/bad-apple