One of the longest-running requests in MAME has been a sample for the cassette tape in the game Journey. After you complete the five stages, you are treated to a bonus stage where the band performs a concert. Inside the cabinet, there was a standard cassette player that would play a tape at this stage. Previously, the only way to play the game on an emulator with the music was with Retrocade, which is long since gone, and only runs on DOS.
Around August 2005, Aaron Giles added support for the tape player and the sample, which was great, but there was still no actual sample. You could create your own by ripping the song "Separate Ways" from a CD, but it still wasn't the actual arcade product.
In December that year, a guy named Jonah mentioned on the MAMEGen messageboard that he had a copy of the tape. After some pushing and prodding from myself, he was kind enough to record it for me.
The tape is a continuous loop of Separate Ways; not the whole song, but the first three minutes of it. Also, the version on the tape is 8 bars shorter than the version found on Journey's Greatest Hits CD. If you listen to the CD, at the 0:22 spot, and again at the 1:52 spot, there is an extra 4 bars (16 beats) of music compared to the tape. The cassette fades out just about right at the 3:00 mark, then there's almost 4 sec. of blank space, and the loop starts over.
I took the CD version of the song, and matched it against the cassette recording (full of snap, crackle, and pop) to line up perfectly - missing the same 8 bars, fades the same at the end, and the same amount of blank space before the loop restarts. It matches up to the tape exactly.
This is as close as we are probably going to get to a "just off the assembly line Journey with never-before-played cassette." IMO, this stacks up as well as any other sample used in MAME.
Serving emulation needs since January 30, 2002
