The Control Deck Test Cartridge. Obviously "fast play" isn't an issue here - as you can see by the last several frames of the movie, the entire thing could be completed in about 10 seconds.
The real hook of this movie is the music that is inserted into the input test. I wrote a program that converts a text file containing the notes to play and append the appropriate input onto the end of an fmv file. Due to frequent nesmock use, you'll have to specify acc=8 and bc=0 in the FCEU movie playback dialog, as this information was lost.
The seven songs played are, in this order:
- A simple scale, up, then down twice as fast
- Mary Had a Little Lamb
- Chopsticks (meant to show off the two-note chords this is capable of)
- Ode to Joy
- Row, Row, Row Your Boat
- Au Claire De La Lune
- Rain, Rain, Go Away
At this point I was at a loss for songs that were short, operated in only one octave, and didn't require any sharps or flats; otherwise I would've included more.
The Program
The program I wrote is fairly simple, and also very unsafe due to lack of time to clean up the bleeding edges. The format is simple. It loads the file and looks for an integer, then two characters. The integer represents how long it will play the note (due to many botched-up chainsaw surgeries done on the code, it does not actually correspond to a number of frames, but comes pretty close), and the two characters represent what notes to play (A, B, C, c, D, E, F, G, or anything else for nothing). The two notes are played at the "same time" by rapidly alternating between them. One note is sustained with a simple auto-fire.
Notes
- The rerecord count should be much higher - probably somewhere between 60 and 70 - because each time I ran the music-inserting program, I had to take a fresh copy of the fcm-turned-fmv to append to, which theoretically counts as a "rerecord."
- At times, a song had to modified to fit into the one octave alotted. This occurs in Chopsticks (a few notes were removed) and Ode to Joy (a note was moved up an octave to fit into the range).
- The notes are somewhat choppy because of how they have to be sustained.
- The same concept used to play two notes could probably be extended to three or even four notes, but the more notes you do, the less "at the same time" they sound. Besides that, it's more trouble on the person composing the textfile because every available note that isn't being played is another x that needs to be manually typed out.
- It's probably possible to make the single notes sound a bit better by using a two or three frame auto-fire, but this would have made writing the program more difficult. As it is, the program itself cannot determine whether it's playing one note or two, since it's all the same to how it outputs them.
- If only player 1 and 2 played different octaves...
Happy April Fool's Day
In the immortal words of Upthorn, April Fools Day submissions should be:
1. Unique
I'm pretty sure I'm the first person to come up with the concept of injecting music into an input test, and if not certainly the first person to do it.
2. Funny
Obviously depends on your definition of funny. I don't really think it's funny per se, but it's certainly entertaining - I made it and have watched the whole thing through about 50 times while testing the various programs involved, and I still have yet to get sick of it.
3. Performed on April 1st
Pretty sure 7:08 PM 4/1/07 local time (GMT -6 D) qualifies.
Truncated: Despite the good votes, we have come to the agreement that this movie will not be published. See topic for details.
adelikat: This has been unrejected for reconsideration to the
Alternative tier, due to more relaxed goal choice rules
