Four Greens - A Handheld Adventure Score - 42 Tracks

The original Game Boy could play four notes at a time. Two pulse channels, one wave channel, one noise channel, one note each. Three of them are pitched. Every piece of music anybody remembers from that machine was written inside that budget, and it is a completely different compositional problem from writing a modern arrangement and putting square-wave patches on it.

This album is written inside the budget. Melody on pulse 1, one companion on pulse 2, bass on the wave channel. No pad, because there is no pad channel. If you want a chord here you arpeggiate it, and if you want counterpoint you give up the arpeggio to get it. That choice is made track by track across the record: 23 tracks give the second channel a countermelody and 19 give it a broken chord.

And you can check it in about a minute. The pack ships channel_budget_proof.json: 210 assertions over all 42 tracks, measured on the MIDI you are buying, saying that no track ever sounds more than three notes at once, that every voice is monophonic, and that every track is scored two-pulse-one-wave. The .mid files are right there if you disagree with any of it.

The fourth channel is yours. CH4 is the noise channel and this score does not write it. On real hardware that is where the drums live. It is left empty on purpose so your own sound effects have it to themselves and are not fighting a drum track for the same voice.

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Forty-two tracks for a whole adventure, not for one screen. Four field cues because that is where a player spends their hours, four towns, three forests, three caves, three locked floors, two mountain passes, two coasts, three encounters that escalate, two guardians, the last fight, the shop, the inn, the quiet room, two chases, two barrows, the person who did not come back, the morning after, and four cues.

Every one of the forty-two states the same shape. Up a fourth, two steps back down to the second, then a third back up to the fourth again, so it never comes home. That is a walking theme: it resolves enough to repeat and never enough to stop. The other three cells on the record are that same walk turned upside down for everything underground, squeezed into a zigzag for anything with teeth, and allowed to arrive only at the very end. Four cells, for the four shades of green that screen could draw.

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What you get

• 42 × .mid — the real editable sources, one file per track, with LOOPSTART and LOOPLENGTH markers
• 42 × .ogg — 44.1 kHz stereo reference renders
• CHANNEL_MAP.md — per track, which MIDI track is which hardware channel and which program stands in for which duty cycle or wave table
• Sample-accurate loop points — LOOPSTART and LOOPLENGTH in the OGG Vorbis comments, in samples, which is exactly what RPG Maker MV/MZ reads, plus the whole table in the Readme
• The proofs — the theory harness output, the audio measurements and the channel budget proof
• Royalty-free in games, commercial use included, no attribution required

About the renders, stated plainly: the .ogg files are a General MIDI reference render through a licence-cleared soundfont. They are not chip emulation and this pack does not claim to be. A General MIDI bank has no pulse oscillators and no wave table, so each program is a documented stand-in for the role the line plays — CHANNEL_MAP.md says which. The claim is about the writing and the voice budget, and the .mid is what you import.

Hear it before you buy it. Four full tracks with their MIDI are free on this page: the walking theme stated plain, the field cue a player hears for hours, the last fight, and the same theme finally allowed to arrive. If you cannot hear that those are the same shape, do not buy the other thirty-eight.

More from CSAF

More music packs from the same studio:

• Saltline - A Voyage & Harbour Score - 42 Tracks
• Aetherbound Vol. I - JRPG Music Pack
• Adversary - Battle & Boss Suite - One Theme From First Encounter To Final Phase
• The Lantern Road - Eastern Fantasy Score - 42 Tracks On One Theme

Everything else we make is at csaf.itch.io.