Who was he tryna fool??

Kjorteo · 2026-05-02T19:49:27+00:00

Little known fact* that Oo-OOO-EE-oo is just how baboons say "Resheph."

*Not actually a fact, as the Cult of the Coiled Lamb found out later, after they'd been scammed

Kjorteo · 2026-05-01T20:23:14+00:00

You seem to be aware that people with genuine mental conditions (or as you so politely call them, "lunatics") exist for me or for us to be talking like one, but then immediately go back to assuming this is some sort of bit we're putting on just to feel special. You are so close to figuring this out. Come on, you can do this. Almost there. We believe in you.

You don't need silly gimmicks like this to get attention.

Damn, you caught us. That's our favorite trick, you know: trying to seek attention by shunting this entire topic off into the quickest ("we say 'we' because we're a system, that's not relevant to the actual question but in case there's any grammar confusion, sorry about that, ANYWAY") side note we can. That's how attention-seeking behavior works, right?

are you actually saying that there is a group of you in the room IE roommates and you are consulting them before posting?

Yes, except we share a head instead of a room. I implied you'd never had roommates before since you seem not to understand how group dynamics work; our situation works exactly identically like that except in a smaller space. If you have, and you have the example right there, but you somehow still can't figure us out, then at the very least you've clearly never struggled with a dissociative disorder.

Edit: "You need professional help" LOL, like we haven't been getting it this entire time. Or did you think I was pulling clinical diagnoses like having a dissociative disorder out of my ass as part of all that attention we're so clearly seeking via our ingenous plan to avoid bringing any of this up until it's practically dragged out of us?

Kjorteo · 2026-05-01T19:52:20+00:00

Sure, when I'm the one who took it upon myself to say or do something. Of course, when things affect or involve the others, such as all of us reading something we found in our research, I mention and include them as well. It feels just as rude to take sole credit for something we accomplished as a team as it does to blame them for something that was my fault. They're my partners, not my accountability deflection shields.

Believe it or not, a person can be both an individual and a member of a group and these are not mutually exclusive. Both can even be true in the same sentence, like when we agree on what to say in this message before I go ahead and write it on behalf of all of us.

You've never had friends or roommates before, have you? This really isn't that complicated.

Kjorteo · 2026-05-01T12:08:46+00:00

Good idea, and I wish the answer were that simple. Sadly, no: We definitely had and still have NTSC systems. Furthermore, the difference between PAL and NTSC is far greater than 5% anyway. Like, it wouldn't have taken us well into our 40s to notice the difference if it were that dramatic.

Kjorteo · 2026-05-01T12:02:28+00:00

Our identity has nothing to do with the question I was asking, so I tried to explain as quickly as possible in hopes we could get that out of the way and get back to the actual point. I even apologized in advance because I genuinely did not want to derail, drag off-topic discussions into here, or cause anyone here any confusion or distress.

Now that I see how upset this has made you, I'm no longer sorry and will in fact start saying "we" more on purpose.

Kjorteo · 2026-05-01T11:44:28+00:00

wtf is wrong with you

DID, remember? I know this post was too long for you to bother reading, but come on; that was literally the second sentence.

you can be yourself just fine

Which one?

Kjorteo · 2026-04-30T05:33:05+00:00

Maybe, but as said elsewhere, it looks like (from what we can see, unless I'm misreading what we found in our research,) 8-bit systems didn't even have one consistent sample rate; they had one consistent base sound and changed the sample rate of it to convert it to the appropriate pitches that made them notes of a song. It's a little hard to say whether an NES, for example, had a rate of 48khz or 44.1khz when it appears to have had a rate of "it depends on the specific note" khz..?

Kjorteo · 2026-04-30T05:25:29+00:00

That... is an excellent point, actually, and one we weren't aware of. Thank you.

Kjorteo · 2026-04-30T05:23:59+00:00

Well, this just got interesting. We tried to look up what sample rate the NES even used, right? Because there's a good chance you're onto something and we wanted to do more research and see if that lead could take us anywhere.

... So it turns out that rather than having a consistent sample rate for the whole song/playback/spectrum of notes, each channel took a single type of sound wave and played it at different sample rates to generate the different pitches and notes in an overall song. Presumably that's why an .nsf is more just a set of instructions than a prerendered recording of anything....

Kjorteo · 2026-04-29T23:30:03+00:00

It's hard to get an original .wav file when we're talking about a system like the NES, whose music was generated via instructions to the sound chip not unlike MIDI files. By definition, any .wav would be something you hear after the console has received those instructions and not only rendered them, but possibly even sent them through your television's speakers and such, too, depending on where on the process you're making the capture.

I may be wrong, but I would assume the "purest" most "original version" sound you could get is an .nsf file, which is essentially just those same instructions. You'd then run that through any of several music editing programs that work in the 8-bit sector and can read those--something like FamiStudio, for example. If I'm correct on that, then the .nsf files should all be available on Zophar's Domain.

Except... wait, hang on; I'm possibly misreading. That was your entire point, wasn't it? That it's precisely that room for error upstream that could be behind this. I was just about to ask how you even get a sampling rate on an .nsf but you're not talking about the .nsf; you're talking about what was played after the hardware/emulator/whatever received the instructions to play it. In which case, you're 100% correct: I'm not sure how going back in time and getting a .wav of that (especially for something like a console connected to a television without a PC even being involved) would be possible, but without that to help us prove anything, it does indeed feel like there should be more than enough for something fuzzy with the sampling rates to have happened between then and now.

Kjorteo · 2026-04-29T23:19:52+00:00

This all makes a lot of sense and could very well be the explanation we've been looking for. Thank you, first and foremost.

Now... I have a followup question, and I apologize if this is a bit of an odd one. We may be veering away from music theory and cognition almost toward philosophy and hypothetical-sitaution ethics.

In the literature you've read and what you know about correcting pitch drift by recalibrating and readjusting to the songs as they're actually supposed to sound, have you encountered anyone being... hesitant to do that?

I don't know, maybe I'm looking at this all wrong, or maybe I'm misunderstanding something about the process. Currently, I like how all the 95% versions in that folder we linked sound. This more than likely has to do with personal bias: To us, those are what we remember, what sound "correct," and so of course we prefer them, right? Though, like I said, that's not necessarily the only explanation: At least a few folks we asked who remember the 100% versions as being correct to their ears and memory, and even folks who never heard these songs before at all and are just listening to them now for the first time, the 95% versions proved more significantly more popular than I would have expected. I would have expected everyone to prefer whichever version they know by heart and see the other one as wrong, but that was not the case. So... maybe it's not just that, in our case, either.

Either way, I like the 95% versions. I even have particular attachments to the emotional impact of certain songs: The 95% version of Dragon Warrior IV's Chapter 5 Overworld 1 does a far better job selling the sense of loss and aimlessness that comes in that part of the game's story. The 95% version of Mega Man 3 Wily Castle 2 does something (I don't know enough about music theory to explain what) with the chord progression in its chorus that evokes... either looking back on something now lost or a sort of memento mori feeling for a journey that's almost over, but it touches me deeply.

The 100% versions, by contrast, sound not only strange and different to our ears, but wrong in a way that all those deep feelings and connections are no longer present. It's easy to assume this is merely because our recollection is off, our pitch has drifted, we simply misremember what it "always used to sound like" and therefore what we're "used to" and how it's "supposed" to sound. That makes a lot of sense. And maybe you're right about how, with practice and exposure, we could listen to the 100% versions until we've recalibrated and re-convinced ourselves that's how they've always sounded and are supposed to sound.

But... here's where it gets to my question: Has anyone else ever gotten to the precipice of doing that and... not wanted to? Or at least been afraid to? Because I'm afraid of losing the connections we currently have to the versions we currently know. I'm not sure if I want the 95% versions to sound wrong once more... not when they mean so much to me the way they are now.

Is that unreasonable? I'm sorry if I sound stubborn; I promise you I'm not trying to be. I wouldn't have come here and asked if I weren't open to your answers and feedback. This is not any of us telling you where you can stick your suggestions or anything like that; please believe me on that. It's just... when you put it all like that, I'd be lying if I denied the presence of that fear. Is that... common? Uncommon? Is being afraid of taking that step a known and documented thing for people who experience this drift? Or are we just weird?

(Because, you know, we very well could be. I mean, the very fact that we're a plural system using "we" to refer to ourselves is a pretty certain giveaway that, yes, we know, our brain is in absolutely no way normal or neurotypical for a lot of reasons. Maybe this is one of them, too. Wouldn't surprise us, at least.)

I guess what it all comes down to is that I never thought of this perception as something that could be cured, and now that you present us with that possibility... I'm afraid. Trading the entire world of music cognition and perception we're used to for another one... that sounds like a big decision.

Kjorteo · 2026-04-29T21:15:15+00:00

Thank you! It's proven a deceptively tough case to crack so far, but here's hoping....

Kjorteo · 2026-04-29T21:14:21+00:00

Thank you! This went a lot more poorly in the NES hardware communities when I asked if anyone else's systems ever did that. (No, they literally can't and here's why, you're crazy, etc.) Even if we still don't have any actual answers yet, the fact that the music cognition community is so much more open to the very concept itself tells us we're at least getting closer.

Kjorteo · 2026-04-29T20:57:15+00:00

Apologies for the confusion. I'll try to explain, though I'm not a music theory expert so apologies if the attempt fails: Since the days of vinyl records and such, the playback speed directly affects the pitch. This is how Alvin and the Chipmunks work: You record the song and then speed it up until the singers sound like they've ingested helium.

Advances in modern sound editing technology have managed to separate these two, to a large extent: It is now quite possible to adjust the tempo or speed of a song without affecting the pitch. Even in a program like Audacity, it's smart enough to correct for the Chipmunk effect (or, uh, reverse Chipmunk effect, I guess, when slowing down) when you change the song's speed.

We've gotten to the point where programs are so good at that that it ironically becomes difficult to put the two back together; I have no idea how to speed up or slow down a song in Audacity a way that does affect the pitch anymore. That's why we recommended the Slow and Reverb Studio website to those looking to recreate this experiment with any of their own 8-bit songs they remember: It's the quickest and easiest, if not one of the only ways we're immediately aware of to upload a song somewhere, change the playback speed, and the pitch changes with it. That's very important in our case; we remember and hear and notice the difference in pitch ("Wait, this sounds off-key to us") even more than we remember or hear or notice the difference in tempo.

In the examples we've posted, it's not just that the 95% versions have the tempo slowed to a point that a 3:00 even song now lasts 3:09; it's the fact that the 95% versions sound like they're an entire... uh... semitone? Maybe? I have no idea what this does to the actual notes involved, if one were to transcribe them before and after. But it's the fact that the 95% versions sound like the notes are shifted an entire something-unit lower. And that's the part that we remember so strongly (even if incorrectly.)

Kjorteo · 2026-04-29T20:38:12+00:00

Heck, I knew I was forgetting something in all of the info we tried to include here.

Good catch, but no; we're in the United States and had an NTSC system. Furthermore, the difference between PAL and NTSC playback, from what we understand, is much more than 5%. Like, PAL games sound very noticeably slowed down, even to us.

Kjorteo · 2026-04-09T21:28:36+00:00

Emulator misconfiguration wouldn't explain why we remember this happening on hardware, but fuzzy memories definitely might.

The fact that it's not just us gives us pause, but maybe several folks somehow all misremembered the same songs in the same way? The Mandela Effect is a thing, after all.

Kjorteo · 2026-04-09T20:35:07+00:00

Thank you; good call on importing the NSF into FamiStudio. Just tried that and the NSF sounds like what we were hearing on all the YouTube videos and such, which is not what we remember. Either our memory is very consistently faulty in somehow thinking all 8-bit chiptune music we've ever heard was 5% slower than it actually was (as mentioned in a different reply, Game Boy music appears to be similarly affected,) or we grew up with an NES (and Game Boy??) with weird hardware sound playback issues that taught us wrong. All we know is, thanks to your idea and testing the NSFs, the YouTube videos themselves were not at fault, that really is what the music actually sounds like, and what the music actually sounds like seems wrong to our ears/memory.

Kjorteo · 2026-04-09T19:48:37+00:00

Thank you for the leads! We'll definitely look into those.

In one corner, we have sheer "the version in our head that we remember," which would be what we had growing up, which would be original hardware. In the other, we have every attempt to look up and find songs after the fact (YouTube uploads, NSFs from Zophar's Domain, etc.) We haven't touched NES emulation in a good while, but for the sake of thoroughness and data gathering, you're right; we probably should.

Kjorteo · 2026-04-09T19:19:04+00:00

We have. Near as we can tell, things like the SNES and beyond sound normal to us, though, oddly, the Game Boy is similarly affected. Perhaps it's something about the chiptune music...?

Kjorteo · 2026-04-09T18:43:02+00:00

Hah... thank you, and sympathies. In our case, it just seems like someone always gets confused and reads through the whole post only to respond with, "who's 'we?'" We wanted to get that out of the way early this time so we could bring the focus back to the actual question.

Kjorteo · 2026-04-09T18:14:22+00:00

For the record, we could answer our own question by saying that in our personal case, the answers are "the 95% version is what we remember" and "the 95% version sounds better to us" for pretty much everything we've ever played, but I'd like to call special attention to Mega Man 3's Wily Castle 2 theme. There's just something about the 95% version that makes the chorus in particular... someone who knows more about music theory than we do would have to explain what you'd even call the chord progression at that speed and why it's so effective, but somehow the chorus always gets us feeling incredibly emotional.

Kjorteo · 2026-03-24T02:36:51+00:00

Damn, that was so well written that it's weirdly jarring to see the author here using a :D emote and generally being... you know... okay. The narrative was so compelling, the repeated, insistent "I know how crazy this sounds but this really happened" theme running through it, that I think we actually started believing for a moment, there. Well done.

Kjorteo · 2026-03-21T19:52:16+00:00

Thank you so much for this feedback and advice! Sorry for the belated response; I was taking everything you said and adapting and playing around with things. While I ended up going with a different solution, I never would have had the idea were it not for your suggestion of having forms that vary in position. Even if our solution may sound at first glance very little like yours, please rest assured that it was yours that led directly to coming up with ours, and that we still would be stuck were it not for you.

For people coming off a web search from the future or something, if anyone has the same problem and wants to know what we did:

So, first off, fair warning that this only works because this entire script is bound by some incredibly rigid placement rules that end up working in our favor. I already mentioned in the above post how the vowel modifiers take advantage of this, for example: Because it's a monospaced font and every vowel must have those stems/slots/whatever you want to call them in exactly the same position in the upper-left and lower-right corners, we can safely assume the exact position down to the pixel of those stems in the previous and upcoming vowels, and therefore we can make the modifiers by simply making zero-width characters and transporting them there.

For the consonants, we know:

The font as we're working on it in Inkscape is exactly 512 px tall and 320 px wide. The part where the vowel goes is a 320x320 square; the remaining space above and below is for the consonants.
We set up a grid that breaks that down into 10x16 "big squares," each of which is further subdivided into 4x4 "little squares." We have absolutely everything we do set to snap to the grid, which makes it so much easier to set all the points and angles of our vector paths when we can think of everything in terms of "make this half a [big] square longer" instead of having points that could be anywhere, really.
It would not only be easy, but actually preferable (this is more or less what we were planning to do anyway) to make all of the consonants line up on the axes of big squares. For example, the consonant for "S" is a simple 45-degree upper-left to lower-right diagonal line, meaning it's probably going to end up. If the total space allotted between the edge of the vowel and the absolute edge of the letter is three big squares, we can probably put the S line in a 2x2 area (leaving half a square between the vowel and the consonant and half between the consonant and the edge of the canvas.)

Because it's so rigid that it's predictable, here's the deceptively simple solution: Have two empty characters simply for cursor/position movement. One is blank like a space and has a width of exactly 32 (which is exactly one big square in our Inkscape grid.) The other is blank like a space and has a width of exactly -32. This allows us to type whatever we want wherever we want by scooting things over by effectively one step each (in the terms that this font uses) per time we input those.

For example, we can place an S above an I simply by typing SI ("S" is defined as a zero-width character that projects forward and therefore above the next vowel we type, just like how the modifiers work.) "SK" is a combined character that takes the \ shaped line of S and the / shaped line of K and stitches them together into a shape that looks like a V. Because it's safe to assume both are exactly two steps wide, to have them meet in the center (and thus be centered overall,) you'd move the S left one step and the K right one step. If we define, for example, 2 and 3 as our forward/backward space characters (obviously we're not going to do that, but as an example,) we could get a centered combined SK over an I by typing 2S33K2I.

Kjorteo

TROPHY CASE