DKC Atlas Forum

[Blaziken257]

No, you're not dreaming. No, I'm not making this up. While some people know about unused music in DKL as well as DKL3, there is also unused music in DKL2! Yeah, I don't think anybody has known about this... until now. It's the Boss Bossanova theme in 8-bit, and you can hear it here:

http://tcrf.net/Donkey_Kong_Land_2

If you've played DKC2 before, chances are good that you've heard this song before. In that game, it's played in all boss stages, except for the K. Rool ones. The latter two use Crocodile Cacophony instead. OK, I assume most of you know that already... but in DKL2 (at least the final version), all boss themes only use the Crocodile Cacophony music.

But with the Boss Bossanova music programmed in the game, why was it unused? I would have liked to hear it in the game, and I certainly like the 8-bit rendition of it. I do think that one high-pitched sound going up and down sounds a bit weird, but still... it would have been better than hearing the Crocodile Cacophony music every time. (Not that I have anything wrong with that music, but having it replace Boss Bossanova is sure weird.)

To hear this for yourself, get a hex editor and go to ROM offsets 0x4037D, 0x40391, 0x403A5, and 0x403B9. These determine the music of Krow's Nest, Kleaver's Kiln, King Zing Sting, and Kreepy Krow, respectively. You'll see that all of these values are 0x23 (making it play the Crocodile Cacophony music). Change them to 0x19 so that they play the Boss Bossanova music instead.

If you use other values, this is the music that will play in these levels:

Spoiler!

00 - Silence
01 - Silence
02 - Stronghold Showdown
03 - Silence
04 - Welcome to Crocodile Isle
05 - K. Rool Returns
06 - Death
07 - Lockjaw's Saga
08 - Titular Tableau
09 - Snakey Chanty
0A - Silence
0B - Bayou Boogie
0C - School House Harmony
0D - Funky the Main Monkey
0E - Flight of the Zinger
0F - Silence
10 - Hot-Head Bop
11 - Run, Rambi! Run!
12 - Target
13 - Token Tango
14 - Bonus Lose
15 - Bonus Win
16 - Stickerbush Symphony
17 - Silence
18 - Disco Train
19 - Boss Bossanova
1A - Steel Drum Rhumba
1B - Krook's March
1C - Klubba's Reville
1D - Silence
1E - In A Snow Bound Land
1F - Lost World Anthem
20 - Silence
21 - Silence
22 - Silence
23 - Crocodile Cacophony
24 - Donkey Kong Rescued
25 - Game Over
Anything else crashes the game!!

Alternately, I have a patch:

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?5vh0r3pkyst8123

Besides changing the first four boss levels to the Boss Bossanova music, I also went ahead and made the following unrelated changes:

- The screen before bonus stages now plays the Titular Tableau music, like in DKC2.
- The 3-second timer on this screen is disabled so that you have to press A to go to the bonus stage, like the GBA version of DKC2. I did this so that people can hear the music before it cuts out too early.
- The Gangplank Galley and Rattle Battle levels now use the Shakey Chanty music instead of the overused Lockjaw's Saga music.

If you don't like these changes, I can also make a patch so that it only changes the music of the boss stages. Also, if anybody wants me to document how I made these changes, I can do that (although explaning how I disabled the timer on the screen before the bonus stage will be complicated as it involves ASM hacking).

Enjoy this unused music that went undiscovered for almost 16 years! I wonder if there's more, but I doubt it...

[Gaz]

I love you Blaziken. Thanks for helping out on discovering new music!

[Qyzbud]

Excellent sleuthing! I've never paid as much attention to DKL2 (or DKL3) as I ought to have, so I wasn't even aware that they had essentially replaced Boss Bossanova with Crocodile Cacophony for this game. Strange choice, I agree... especially if they'd already gone to the effort of recreating the track in 8-bit. Perhaps it was a matter of forgetfulness or miscommunication? Checking out the game credits for the DKC/DKL games on Wikipedia, it looks like DKL2's designer (Lee Schuneman) and composer (Grant Kirkhope) weren't part of the DKC2 team - so perhaps the DKL2 team didn't realise that there were two boss themes. Why they chose Crocodile Cacophony over the more often encountered, and (one would assume), better-know Boss Bossanova is anyone's guess...

[Gaz]

I, myself happen to think they should've used the Boss Bossanova theme too. They're using the final boss song. ILLOGICAL! I still can't believe it takes seventeen years for one to unravel this song. I wonder why no-one (except B257) bothered to look for this song. Anyways, congrats to the genius/king of Donkey Kong Land.

[TheUltimateKoopa]

Is there a GBS rip of this game that includes ALL the music? The only GBS rips I've known don't include things like Donkey Kong Rescued (Character Parade), Titular Tableau (Credits, this could also just as easily be Swanky's Swing), or Token Tango (Bonus)

Also, this got me thinking...

Do you reckon that all the music in DKC2 was going to be used in DKL2? Maybe somewhere, there's the Forest Interlude, Primal Rave and Haunted Chase songs for example.

[Geno]

I KNEW there must have been unused music in this game! There was in DKL. And DKLIII. But somehow, I knew that something like this was hidden SOMEWHERE!
I'm mainly happy about this because it's my favourite DKL game, as it was the first one I got. At $9.99 too!

Know, all we need is someone to make Game Boy remixes of all the DKC, DKC2 and DKC3 tracks that aren't in the DKL games and I'll be a very happy person.

[TheUltimateKoopa]

Hmm.... Grant Kirkhope 'converted' the DKC2 soundtrack to Game Boy levels, right? Maybe we should ask him

Anyway, as I said, all the main stage BGMs from DKC3 were in DKL3, but not all the main stage BGMs from DKC2 were in DKL2.

Here's a list of tracks from DKC3 that are not featured in DKL3:
Boss Boogie
Sub-Map Shuffle
Wrinkly 64
Get Fit A-Go-Go
Knautilus
Banana Bird
Chase
Hangin' at Funkies

Here's a list of tracks from DKC2 that are not featured in DKL2:
Jib Jig
Boss Bossanova (has been discovered in the ROM, yay!)
Forest Interlude
Haunted Chase
The Flying Crock
Primal Rave

I may have missed some.

As I said in my previous post, maybe some of these are hidden in the ROMs, like Boss Bossanova?

[Geno]

You missed Frosty Frolics from DKC3, in DKLIII, the snow levels used Water World. (At least that's what I heard)
And Kematoa Koncert.
Also Jangle Bells and Mama Bird.

The Flying Krock is actually Crocodile Cacophony, which IS in DKL2 (, unless you meant the music that plays on the map screen when Krool climbs into the Flying Krock).

[Mattrizzle]

Not just the discovery of an unused music track, but a patch restoring it, to boot? Awesome.

Stuff like this always raises more questions than answers. Was this track's omission a result of a lack of communication? Did someone on the team find the high-pitched portion of the song annoying? All we know for sure is that it was planned at one point for this to be used in the game.

[TheUltimateKoopa]

You missed Frosty Frolics from DKC3, in DKLIII, the snow levels used Water World. (At least that's what I heard)
And Kematoa Koncert.
Also Jangle Bells and Mama Bird.

The Flying Krock is actually Crocodile Cacophony, which IS in DKL2 (, unless you meant the music that plays on the map screen when Krool climbs into the Flying Krock).

Yeah, I meant this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fvm-CeZqd1g

[TheUltimateKoopa]

So, since Grant Kirkhope was responsible for "porting" the DKC2 soundtrack to the Game Boy, would it be a good idea to ask him about any other unused music?

http://www.grantkirkhope.com/contact.html

[Blaziken257]

Wow, I wasn't expecting this many replies! I didn't realize this song would be popular. One thing that make this song hard to discover is that certain songs, like the Boss Bossanova one, will only play in certain screens, like boss stages, bonus stages, the Klubba screen, etc. Other examples are Token Tango, Klubba's Reveille, and Donkey Kong Rescued, which coincidentally don't show up in any DKL2 OST's that TheUltimateKoopa has found. In other screens, like most levels, the music is either silent (or it can even crash the game sometimes). To see what I mean, try this:

1. Get a hex editor, like XVI32.
2. Go to offset 0x400AD -- this controls the music of Pirate Panic.
3. Change it to either 13 (Token Tango), 19 (Boss Bossanova), 1C (Klubba's Reville), or 24 (Donkey Kong Rescued).
4. Play Pirate Panic, and notice that either the game crashes, or the music is silent.
5. Now go to offset 0x4037D to control the music of Krow's Nest.
6. Change it to one of the values mentioned before.
7. Notice that the music will play!

If you see the list of all the hex values that I have in my first post, you'll see that there are ones that I marked as silent. This is because they're all silent in every screen that I've seen. However, if anybody wants to try to discover new songs, here is what you can do:

1. If you have Windows, download the bgb emulator. (I've also heard it works in Linux under Wine.)
2. Open bgb.
3. Open a DKL2 ROM by right-clicking the window, and clicking Load rom... (note: you can also use DKL3 for this whole thing as well, as the two games have extremely similar game engines).
4. Once the ROM is loaded, right-click the window again, go to Other, then debugger.
5. A new window will open up. On the menu bar, go to Debug->breakpoints.
6. Another new window will open up. On the bottom, there's a textbox that says "PC=" to the left of it. Enter "1:417A" in this box (this will work for English/Japanese versions of DKL2 and DKL3), then click "Add" on the bottom.
7. Close this window.
8. Now play the game.
9. Every time a screen changes, the emulator will stop at 1:417A.
10. In the debugger window, you'll notice a bunch of registers in the top-right window. The one that you want to look here is "bc". This register, at the point that the game is stopped here, controls the music of the current screen.
11. To change the value of this register, right-click the part where it says "bc =". You should see a menu with an "edit register" option. Click it.
12. Change it to whatever you want, but be aware that any value greater than 0025 (hexadecimal) will glitch the game.
13. Press F9 to resume the game. The music should change!

If anybody's wondering what the code does after this breakpoint, first it determines the tempo, then it determines the melody for all four channels.

Why is this useful? Well, you can control the music in any screen with this method. Now, if somebody has the patience to check every screen (since some music plays in certain screens but not others) and try out the "silent" music on these screens, then that would be great. I seriously wonder if 00, 01, 03, 0A, 0F, 17, 1D, 20, 21, or 22 will ever play on any screen... if anybody finds anything, then feel free to post it here!

(Alternately, if anybody can figure out why certain music only plays in certain screens, and hack it so that all music plays in all screens, that would be even better. But that requires lots of ASM knowledge, since you'd have to reverse engineer the existing code, and then modifying it. I've tried to do this, though, but the code is confusing, so I haven't had any luck yet! And it's not the syntax that confuses me -- the problem is that it's hard for me to even find the code in the first place!)

Also, I seriously wonder if anybody can find more unused songs in DKL3 besides Rocket Run by doing this. In DKL3, 00, 01, 0A, 17, and 18 are all silent. However, unlike DKL2, it doesn't have that "certain music only plays in certain screens" quirk, at least from what I've seen. But nevertheless, I wonder if anybody can find anything... after all, DKC GBC has an unused theme that sounds like it comes from DKL3 (judging from the instruments) -- it's an 8-bit rendition of the music when you lose to Swanky's mini-game.

Now, as for Boss Bossanova... I do seriously wonder why the song was never used. The only reason I can think of is because of that high-pitched noise, which is a bit annoying, but certainly not enough to prevent the song from being used... Or maybe whoever programmed DKL2 never worked on DKC2 and didn't know it was supposed to be used for the boss levels. I don't know. But as we all know, DKL2 is certainly not the only DK game to have unused music.

Like TheUltimateKoopa said, maybe Grant Kirkhope knows why it was never used... It would be cool if someone asked him about it.

In any case, I'm glad you all like this discovery of this song. Like I said, I didn't know it would be this popular.

[TheUltimateKoopa]

So, this would potentially mean (using a hex editor), testing each and every 'unused' value for the music, in each and every room?

[Geno]

Here, I've recorded the unused "Lose Swanky bonus game" music, and here it is!

http://cutstuff.net/molly/DBBKUP/dkcgbc%20unused.mp3

This IS unused, as I have DKC GBC, and I'm sure it isn't in the game.



EDIT: I FOUND SOMETHING COOL!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNUFz5bWiO8

Fanmade GB remix of Klomp's Romp. Jib Jig, Forest Interlude, and Mining Melancholy (done by a different guy) GB remixes are in the description.

Maybe someone can ask this dude to remix the other DKC2 and 3 tracks as well.

[TheUltimateKoopa]

So I e-mailed Grant Kirkhope (being the sole composer of DKL2).

And pretty much asked him if there were ever any other DKC2 songs ported to DKL2. Now we just wait..... for the inevitable "Sorry, I can't comment on ..." type response.

[TheUltimateKoopa]

So here's his response:

"Hello!

Alas I really can't remember! That was my first job at Rare, I converted Dave Wise's tunes from the SNES but I didn't really have too much to do with the actual game ..... He might know .... He's on Facebook, I'm sure he'll tell you.

When I first started work on GoldenEye I didn't have a dev kit so I wrote some music using full quality samples and synths, they're the tunes that you hear on my website, there was only a handful of those,

Cheers,
Grant."

I don't use Facebook, but if anyone wants to contact the "wise" man , do so

You know what I've always wanted to ask him (Dave)?

If he has, or if he'll ever release any Donkey Kong Country 3 GBA music, in not just studio quality, but in (for the love of quality)... stereo.

Stereo FLACs of Donkey Kong Country 3 GBA music? I think the fact that the GBA sound quality as a whole is (now) quite poor, and the fact it's mono makes the soundtrack less bearable than it would be in stereo. I expect stereo studio quality FLACs (or at least decent quality MP3s, but still stereo), would actually make the soundtrack sound pretty awesome, right?

If only there was away of extracting individual channels from the GSFs (I'm sure there is a way with a hex editor, but I have no idea where the channels are), as then, one could simply, create one WAV file for each separate channel, then use something like Audacity to change the panning for each instrument.

If I open "AGB-BDQE-USA.gsflib" in HexEdit, what address would I go to to find the 'channels' for, say, AGB-BDQE-USA-0000.minigsf (which is Stilt Village)?

[Blaziken257]

Wow, it's interesting that he responded... but it's unfortunate that he doesn't remember any other DKC2 songs that made it to DKL2 but ended up unused. Then again, the game was released nearly 16 years ago, so it's not that surprising.

In the meantime, I'll try to figure out why those songs are silent in the first place. I'm convinced it's a glitch, as Token Tango causes the game to crash when the game attempts to play it in Pirate Panic, and Klubba's Reville only makes the right speaker functional. Also, when the game tries to play Donkey Kong Rescued on the Krocodile Isle map right after visiting Klubba's Kiosk, one of the sound channels is missing (it sounds very weird). (Change offset 0x11098 to 0x24 in an English DKL2 ROM to see for yourself.) So the point is: I'll try to figure out why it's doing that, and if I do, I'll try to fix it. I can't promise anything though.

Also, I don't have a Facebook account either*, so unfortunately I can't ask Dave Wise if he knows any other unused DKL2 songs. Hopefully someone with a Facebook account will see this thread and ask him...

And yeah, I'm also curious if there are other high-quality DKC3 GBA songs that Dave composed.

I have no idea how stereo FLACs work, though, so I can't help you there. Sorry.

*(I don't trust Facebook one bit, but I don't want to get started with that.)

[TheUltimateKoopa]

What about DKL3? There are some silent ones there, I think...

I'm convinced that at some point ALL the DKC2 and DKC3 songs were "8-bitified".

[Mr.Diddy]

I hope Klomp's Romp and Jib Jig are in there somewere and the other missing songs (even though I don't remember any other ones)!

[Gaz]

Here's an IPS patch with some more music modified (Gangplank Galley and such);

Donkey Kong Land 2 - Music Hack.ips

(44 Bytes) Downloaded 1115 times

Blaziken257

[TheUltimateKoopa]

What does this patch have that the one Blaziken posted in the first post, doesn't have?

[Gaz]

Gangplank Galley's music matching Pirate Panic's music .

[TheUltimateKoopa]

Um.... the original patch in the first post has the following changes:
- The screen before bonus stages now plays the Titular Tableau music, like in DKC2.
- The 3-second timer on this screen is disabled so that you have to press A to go to the bonus stage, like the GBA version of DKC2. I did this so that people can hear the music before it cuts out too early.
- The Gangplank Galley and Rattle Battle levels now use the Shakey Chanty music instead of the overused Lockjaw's Saga music.

Again, what is the difference between THIS one, and the one you posted? BOTH replace Ganglank Galley's music (Lockjaw's Saga) with Snakey Chanty (Which is the theme used on Pirate Panic in DKL2)....

[Gaz]

Not much, except what you mentioned.

[TheUltimateKoopa]

Would I be pushing it, if I asked why you uploaded it?

[Blaziken257]

Yeah, it does sound like the same patch. I guess Gaz just took the link from my YouTube video and didn't realize it was the same one... that said, if anybody wants a patch that only restores the Boss Bossanova music, I can do that.

Now, an explanation of why certain songs are silent... the short answer is because it's due to limited Game Boy RAM. Most of the songs can fit into 0x4000-0x7FFF in RAM (which is loaded from 0x4000-0x7FFF in ROM), but due to limited space, some DKL2 songs (Token Tango, Boss Bossanova, Klubba's Reveille, Donkey Kong Rescued, and Titular Tableau) needed to be loaded into 0xD000-0xDA7F in RAM (from 0x7F54E-0x7FFCD in the English version). Thing is, 0xD000 (and beyond) is sometimes used for other things (and therefore often overwritten), such as decompressed map data, so these songs are only loaded when necessary (such as in a bonus stage, Klubba's screen, etc.). The funny thing is that this music is loaded in boss stages as well, for no other reason than to load the Boss Bossanova music.

Now, with that said, here's some good news: I discovered leftover music from DKL2 in DKL3 (Token Tango, Boss Bossanova (!), Klubba's Reveille, Donkey Kong Rescued, and Titular Tableau)!

It's the five songs that are loaded starting at 0xD000 in RAM (although in DKL3, they exist from 0x70000-0x70A7F in ROM). These songs were never removed, nor was the function to load these songs removed. Like the case with Rattly, they were never intended to be used; it's just leftover content from DKL2. This page explains how to restore the tracks (it's a complicated explanation, since unlike Rocket Run in DKL3, or Boss Bossanova in DKL2, the five leftover songs in DKL3 don't even have pointers, so it's harder here). If you don't feel like doing it yourself, here's a patch that you can apply to the Japanese version (and I can make an English version one if anyone wants). Hear what happens in the first five boss stages! I also had to disable the routine to load short versions of other level music to make this work properly, as you'd hear the wrong music (or sometimes glitchy music) after the first time you go to a level if I didn't do this.

Now, the bad news: having dug deeper into the ROMs than I did when I first discovered Boss Bossanova in DKL2, I am highly certain that there's no other unused music in any of the DKL games. So, if you wanted to hear an official 8-bit version of Forest Interlude, Frosty Frolics, etc., then you're out of luck -- sorry. If anybody who has good knowledge of assembly wants to try to prove me wrong, go ahead -- but don't be surprised if you don't find anything new. I looked pretty hard already (although not as much for DKL, but it would still surprise me if there's unused DKL music that's yet to be discovered).

Also, if anybody wants me to post pointers of every DKL2 and DKL3 track, I can do that. Also, eventually, I plan to slowly learn the music format (and I'd have to learn all of this in the process), which would hopefully make it possible to write custom music.