Hey everyone. So I'm a huuge fan of the Gauntlet games, as I'm sure some of you are. I especially love Gauntlet 1 and 2 on the NES. Gauntlet 2 is incredible fun with 4 people, but its lack of any music always leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The intro theme is a mediocre 15 second long loop. The voice in the game is amazing, but aside from that all of the sound is either nonexistent or kinda garbage. 

I don't have any experience with 6502, only a few higher level languages. However, I am going to college to work on music tech and music performance. My question is, how difficult would it be for someone to hack Gauntlet 2 and throw those few KBs of music from Gauntlet 1 in? Is it even doable, or is all the storage taken up by the voice? What would it take to do? 

I always thought it was that Mindscape cheaped out on the music, because they have a reputation of doing that. I never really thought it could be due to a storage limitation. 

Also how do I delete a thread? Didn't mean to make 2, my phone decided it wanted to. Can't find any sort of delete anywhere

Here's what you do...

Play the game with the sound off. Then, listen to YouTube videos of good NES game music.

Done!

For some reason, very few people do music hacks of games. I think it's because every game has a different music system, and it's a bit tedious to figure out. Easier, would be to remake the songs in Famitracker, and put them in with Famitone...but you'd have to make some special accommodations for sound effects. Doable, but painstaking.

Gotcha. I'd love to try this out but I have no idea where to start. I'll start looking into FamiTone and the Gauntlet 2 sound engine

Just to be clear. Famitracker is a tool for writing NES compatible music, Famitone is the code to play it in a game. I only mentioned them, because I have a feeling that the 2 games probably have incompatible music systems.

You are still going to have to locate the music code and music data for both games. This may not be a good first project. If I did it, I would do a quick disassembly of both games, look for writes to sound registers. Do traces, or Code/Data logs. Corrupt the data, to verify the start location of each music data (each song), Drop the code and data from the one game to the other. Carefully search for references in the code for the correspoding variables for 'song' and 'sound effects'. Change the variables in the code to match.

See. Tedious. And requiring a lot of patience and knowledge of 6502 ASM.

I assume there's a reason there's no music in Gauntlet 2. Possibly because of full banks.

But who knows!

Gotcha. Well then shoot, I probably won't take it on then. Maybe another day, when I know what I'm doing lol. 

One last AFAIK consideration. The facts that the NES triggers a NMI each 1/60th of a second, it is of course a nice thing for many reasons when coding a game: sprites move at constant speed, music plays at constant speed, and so on. However, this means that between two NMI there is a specific amount of cycles (about 30000 IIRC) to calculate how make "things" happen in the next frame. In a "slow" pace game (like a chess game maybe) to have the code behave in such a way that if there is a lot to compute the computation is postponed to the next frame is of course not an issue. In an action game like gauntlet (which by the way is in my top 20 favorite NES games for sure) skipping frames to end up computing could likely end up in slowdowns (kind of like in Zelda when facing the dragon boss, for instance). So besides space on banks, I guess that another possible reason for lacking music, it is other feautures of game already drains up the processor resources: many sprites on screen, all moving, check collisions, and so on. I am just guessing, maybe they were cheap on music like you said, but maybe they delibarately chose to give up on music to use the NES processor full potential to polish up better other aspects of the game.

Like other said, without reverse engineering it, you cannot say.