If you've ever been curious to witness what Konami's Contra or Castlevania II: Simon's Quest might have sounded like had they been released on a Sega Master System, instead of the NES, then you're in luck.
That's because, recently, a musician named chirinea has been putting together some impressive Sega PSG-recreations of music from the two games and sharing the results in several YouTube videos published on his channel for everyone to hear.
The tracks, as you'll be able to tell from the annotations included in the original videos, were written by chirinea for a pair of work-in-progress Master System ports of the two titles, from the programmer Enrico Pallazzo, with the pair originally getting together to collaborate on the port of Contra four months ago, before starting another project based on the Castlevania sequel at the start of this month.
As far as we're aware, neither project is close to being finished, with a lot of the actual gameplay still be implemented. But a few different demos are currently available to download from SMS Power (including here and here), giving an indication of what Contra and Castlevania II might have been like to witness had they appeared on the 8-bit Sega console.
chirinea's original Contra video sees the musician going over his arrangements of the title screen music, as well as the theme for the opening Jungle level, with later videos show Sega PSG takes on other tracks such as the boss theme, the bases theme, stages 3, 5, 6, and 8, and the end credits.
As for Castlevania II, meanwhile, he has published two videos so far, showing off the town theme "The Silence of Daylight" and the day theme "Bloody Tears".
What do you think? Let us know in the comments!