After Thunder Lands, we got very interested on handhelds and soon, we started gathering information about the new GameBoy Advance. It was very early yet. The console was still under development. No emulators existed yet and the only way to work on GBA-like hardware was using Nintendo's official TS boards. There wasn't much documentation on the platform either. So we thought we could take some advantage and started working on it. We wrote some of the first unofficial sound docs, that would be used to help implementing new Direct Sound's hardware emulation in some emulators, like MappyVM. We also developed some of the very first sound demos, that would be used to test some of the first GBA emulators. All our contributions were posted at www.gbadev.org and had many offers to work on many indie projects.

People at Cuchipandi Technologies introduced us to Super Fighter Team's project manager, Brandon Cobb. They were working on some ports based on an old PC game, Super Fighter, a fighting game created by the Taiwanese C&E Inc. With Super Fighter Team and C&E being business partners, the license was happily shared with Super Fighter Team. So we licensed our sound engine to them and did some covers and remixes of the original music.

RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

During our research period, we developed a high perfomance sound engine for GBA, implementing some unique features. Maybe the most important was the Dolby Pro-Logic realtime encoder, that could pan 3D sounds using a Dolby Pro-Logic decoder. Also implemented a realtime parametrizable delay and a simple but powerful interactive music system. The engine was fully customizable to fit different CPU and memory constraints. We refused to work with older GBC compatible channels, so our engine's minimum sound quality would always be above most GBA titles that mixed digital music with older GameBoy square tones, like Street Fighter.

COVERS & VERSIONS

During the project, we remixed all original Super Fighter's soundtrack into 6 channel tracked modules. Another set of 4-channel MODs was also adapted to be used with the engine in this game and other related projects.

INTERACTIVE MUSIC

Some changes and additions were made to the covers in order to add interactive changes to the original music. Some real instruments (electric guitar and bass) were sampled to be used in the mixes.