Great article on Street Fighter II’s low level audio.
Trivia: How does Street Fighter accelerates playback speed when a round situation becomes critical (contestant low health). It doesn’t. These are hard-coded separate music tracks.
My whole life I thought SFII audio engine being “MIDI”-based meant that they could simply increase the tempo/accelerate playback for the low health part.
*pikachu face*
On the other hand, it totally makes sense: tons of stuff are hard-coded in games. Tons.
The bottom line in game development is always, if you can make it a dumb asset instead of using precious CPU cycles to do your thing, please fucking do so.