- A pointer to the name of the song (two bytes)
- A main track (one byte)
- A sub-track (one byte)
The third byte of each of these entries contains the main track (for example, for the first song in the music test, it would be at $C38F), and this is later written to $08 in the CPU RAM (if you use a debugger such as the one found in bsnes-plus, and set a write breakpoint to $08, this breakpoint is hit every time the music changes). The fourth byte (e.g. $C390 for the first song) is a sub-track. Some main tracks have only one sub-track, but others (such as levels with life loss and ending themes) contain multiple. After tinkering with some values in these two bytes, I found that changing the main track (ROM offset $C38F) to #$2E and the sub-track (ROM offset $C390) to #$00 is some level end fanfare music that sounds different from any used level fanfare music.
To hear this for yourself, I released a patch (in both .ips and .bps format) which should be applied to a clean unheadered DKC3 USA ROM (you only need one of these, but I recommend .bps as it is error-proof):
- .bps: http://www.mediafire.com/file/jtzkgavop ... t_hack.bps
- .ips: http://www.mediafire.com/file/z4kndzibk ... t_hack.ips
Once you apply one of the patches, go to the music test screen, and select the first song (I replaced Dixie Beat with this unused music track, which should be obvious once you see it). For easy comparison, I also changed most of the other songs in the music test so that they play the level end fanfare music instead of the main level music (where applicable). (I did this by changing many of the sub-tracks. If you look at a hex editor, you'll notice that many offsets, such as $C398 (Cavern Caprice), $C39C (Water World), $C3A0 (Rockface Rumble), etc. were changed from 00 to 04, though a few, such as the boss sub-tracks, were changed to 01, because they don't contain the mid-level subtracks that normal levels do.) Some non-obvious songs, such as Crystal Chasm and Jangle Bells, also have their own fanfares that sound similar to the ones at the end of levels, so be sure to listen to those too!
Hopefully someone can verify that this is indeed unused... it does sound similar to some of the other level end fanfare music, but not exactly! Then again, someone may know something that I don't... but if this is unused, then it could mean that every DK game that Rare has ever made has unused music! (Well, except for most of the GBA games...)
And hopefully someone can make sense of this lengthy explanation...
