Metroid II: Return of Samus (bootleg with stereo mix)

This is a complete, ground-up rebuild of my earlier Metroid II remaster. After completing my Metroid remaster with its stereo remix, I thought that it'd be a good idea to do the same to Metroid II, since it also has a (mostly) mono soundtrack but uses sound channels like the NES, giving an opportunity to easily create new stereo masters of the songs. I used a Winamp plugin called Nezplug++ to isolate the channels of the .gbs file from Zophar's Domain and export them to 16/44.1 WAV (unfortunately the highest resolution Nezplug++ supported) via Winamp's built-in Diskwriter output plugin. I then realised that isolating the channels like this made it much easier and less destructive to do declicking and other general audio repair, so this project evolved to redoing the gamerip I made earlier this year. Omega Metroid Territory is now pretty much click-free, for example. Deep Caverns 3 still has some tiny clicks, however - some of the clicks were so deeply embedded in the wave channel that they were nearly impossible to see on the waveform and an automatic declicker would have done too much damage to the channel as a whole - but it is more listenable than it was before my repair. The mono masters were a simple matter of importing the channels into Audacity and mixing them all down to a single mono track. For the stereo masters, I generally inverted one side of the noise channel to create an illusion of depth (as with my Metroid stereo remix), left the wave channel on both left and right and panned square 1 and 2 left or right depending on the song. Some tracks, however, had less channels and limited opportunity for depth/stereo effects so I had to get a bit creative; you'll see this in the table below.

A few details to round up with: the audio repair was done with iZotope RX 7 as usual, the conversion to 16/44.1 FLAC was done with Foobar2000 and the tagging was done manually in MP3tag. Disc 1 is the soundtrack as it is heard in-game (mostly mono with the exception of the stereo fanfares) and disc 2 contains the stereo remixes. I set both discs to peak at -0.3 dBFS, as anything over that would have ran the risk of intersample clipping. Hope you enjoy.

-White_Fox97

© Nintendo

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Stereo Mixes:
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Track |Square 1 |Square 2 |Wave |Noise |

Title Theme |L100 |R100 |B |B inv. |
Surface of SR388 |R100 |L100 |B |B inv. |
Vs. Metroid |L100 |R100 |B |B inv. |
Deep Caverns 1 |R100 |B, inv. |L100 |N/A |
Ancient Chozo Ruins |R100 |L100 |B inv. |N/A |
Deep Caverns 2 |R100 |B, inv. |L100 |N/A |
Deep Caverns 3 |Start B inv., rest L100|R100* |Start L100, rest B inv.|N/A |
Deep Caverns 4 |B inv. |Start R100, rest B inv.|L100 |N/A |
Omega Metroid Territory|R100 |L100 |B |B inv. |
Metroid Nest |N/A |R50 |L50 |B inv. |
The Last Metroids |R100 |L100 |B |B inv. |
Metroid Queen Lair |R100 |L100 |B |B inv. |
Vs. Metroid Queen |L100 |R100 |B |B inv. |
The Infant Metroid |R100 |L100 |B |B inv. |
Ending Theme |R100 |L100 |B |B inv. |

Key:
L = Left channel
R = Right channel
B = Both channels
0-100 = Percentage of panning left or right in Audacity
B inv. = Both channels but with one side inverted