World Driver Championship N64 Complete Soundtrack CD

PAL 50Hz

A nintendo ost played back on a Sega system!

Relax! I'm still a Sega Mega Drive man, i'm not jumping ship to the Nintendo brand. This is a one time thing only.

I felt like doing something really weird this time and decided on uploading a Nintendo 64 game soundtrack and play it back on the SEGA Mega-CD attachment to the awesome SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis.

One day in 1998 I had a stomach bug that was very serious in which I had to go to hospital, in the hospital in the children's ward they had Nintendo 64 consoles that they would bring into the patient room bedsides, I remember playing Diddy Kong Racing for the first time and my dad was blown away by the 64 bit graphics and decided then and there that he was going to get one. I have fond memories of World Driver Championship on the N64 as my dad loved N64 racing games and he bought this one and flogged it to death. Watching him play it over the years made me wanna get in on the action and I too eventually got my own N64 console back in the early 2000's and I bought my own copy of this game, mastered it, finished it and that's how I recorded this game's soundtrack as there is no sound test in it, you have to play until the end just to get all the tunes.

One of the last racing simulations to be released for Nintendo 64, this graphically intensive title uses custom microcode optimization and high polygon count modelling. The development team was able to optimize the usage of the various processors within the N64 to allow a great draw distance (reducing the need for fog or pop-up), highly detailed texturing and models, Doppler effect MP3 audio, and advanced lighting and fog effects for realistic weather conditions. Increasingly prevalent toward the latter years of the N64's commercial lifetime, the game has a high resolution 640x480 mode that does not require the add-on N64 RAM Expansion Pak. Additionally, unlike many other games of its type on the platform, the game runs high resolution at a smooth pace.

Boss Game Studio planned to release an updated port of the game on the Nintendo GameCube, but never published it.

The soundtrack, consisting of original rock and heavy metal tunes, was composed by musician Zack Ohren. Let's face it. The Super NES has a soundchip, the N64 doesn't have a soundchip. That's how it is. The N64 shares its workload with the co-processor -- actually, let me rephrase that: The whole machine does it, because you can also make music with the CPU. It just seems that at the moment most people are preoccupied with pumping out cool graphics -- and that's also what most gamers want. And the more graphics you do on the N64, the less performance you have left over for sound. With the Super NES, you knew that you could do all this and then you still had a sound chip to handle the music. On the N64, sound eats up performance which is probably why World Driver Championship's music sounds like multiple Yamaha 2612 DAC channels of the Mega Drive/Genesis in low quality.

Audio Specs Of The Nintendo 64:

Audio Interface (AI) reads data from the audio buffer using a fixed time interval, and sends it to the DA (digital-to-analog) converter (audio DAC) to produce the sound output. 16-bit, stereo, CD quality is possible with total voices of 16–24 channels with pitch-shifting PCM, up to 100 PCM channels theoretically possible. Sampling frequency is 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz, selectable.

Hearing this game's music the first few times it's quality does sound quite rough to your ears but after a while it grows on you and the low quality thing becomes redundant to notice. If you think World Driver Championship has a low quality soundtrack then you haven't heard ''Top Gear Overdrive'' which had music by the band ''Grindstone'' and as far as i'm concerned is the worst sample quality I have ever heard! Very muddy and compressed sound, no treble, no bass and it sounds much worse than the Mega Drive/Genesis of the 16-bit era.

The music in this game is purely sample-based, there is no heavy metal band playing the music even though the N64 can handle actual full recorded songs from bands and artists. Not sure what program Zack used to put the music together for the game but i'm definitely sure he played and recorded all the instruments and guitar parts himself including the guitar solos which are just a bunch of small samples snipped together.

MUSIC COMPOSER: Zack Ohren 1999.

SOUND PROGRAMMER: Zack Ohren 1999.

SOUND QUALITY: 384 Kbps.

TRACK LIST: ♫

1. bgm 1 (00:17)
2. bgm 2 (07:14)
3. bgm 3 (13:10)
4. bgm 4 (19:23)
5. bgm 5 (26:40)
6. GT 2 (33:07)
7. GT 1 (38:00)
8. Intro/Title Screen (42:51)
9. Ending (44:04)
10. Race Course Preview (44:50)
11. Race Results (45:05)
12. New Car Available (45:40)
13. Last Place (46:09)
14. Second Place (46:46)
15. Options (47:22)

I recorded this way back in 2001, it was probably my very first video game recorded soundtrack on a CD that I recorded myself.

Metal forever!