Actually, you're quite right in thinking that there is order in the older systems. A lot of them are tile based as far as the graphics are concerned. As far as NES ROMs are concerned, those that have VROM (Video ROM), are stored in a separate ROM chip from the PRG (Program ROM), or right at the end of the iNES or UNIF file. Some games have their tile graphics integrated into the PRG, in that case the game will have VRAM which isn't so uniform as the data can be compressed or stored in an odd way sometimes.
The sound driver you could say is a container of sorts, has all the tunes for the entire game.
The sprites are also part of VROM in most cases. One 4KB bank is for sprites, the other 4KB bank is for bankground tiles in the average 8KB CHR (Character ROM) bank switching game. However, this isn't always so, some banks can be mixed.
Then you have the PRG banks which is what makes everything go, it's the actuall program that interacts with the hardware of the system. It's the programmer telling the hardware what to do. There are different sized banks depending on the mapper controller. The banks get loaded in based on the mapper and what the programmer wants and the code is executed. The program is actually where everything is different. No two games are ever the same, all code, data, etc are all in different address locations.
If you have a game that has a file system, like FDS for example. Those are very tricky at times to figure out what is what and how the files are loaded at various times.
Oh yeah, video games are certainly computers, in my opinion.
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I hate to tell ya this. However, NSFs didn't exist back in 1994, so you wouldn't have found any then, lol. The first public NSF documentation was released in 05-11-1999. Many NSFs were released sporatically over the many years since 1999. Zophar's Domain kept good track of NSFs for awhile until they fell behind. ZD still has a decent archive but out of date because a lot of NSFs have been fixed and/or reripped, as well as tons of new ones coming out. If you want more NSFs I can point you in the direction of other archives, including my site which has tons of them. And oh yeah, you may know that ZD started in 1996. We all got the word on that recently, where the site was located at over the years before ZD got the domain.
Yeah, I've ran into a few games where it didn't seem like the music matched the game or the level the tune was playing on, lol. I think that Silent Service does have a few decent tunes. However, I have yet to play the game which I'm planning on soon to find out how it plays.
Oh yeah, I have listened to both of the MIDIs and I liked them. Just to tell ya, it seems like to me that repeating and looping tunes are good for MIDI and other music media. While live performed music has a limit on how long the tune is. Especially for radio channels, a limit on song length had to be set so that the channel could get commercials in on time according to their schedule. I say that if a song feels like it shouldn't end, then don't let it end.
As far as influences are concerned. I think I know what you're talking about. You tinker around with it and if it sounds good, you go with it. I've done that a few times myself and have a couple crappy NSF hacks laying around. I also play guitar upon occassion, so I try to compose music, but I'm not very good at it, I admit.
After completing any of my composing projects, I listen to it and immediately recognize what my influences are, even though I was concentrating on the details of construction which to me is just a means to an end for the final product.
Apparently there are compatibility problems with pitch wheel from what I was reading here a moment ago. Some sound cards even play them as single notes instead of how it's supposed to function, or other unpredictable behaviour. I try to avoid using anything that has a problem between players in most cases.
By all means do investigate.
. Not to mention the fact that the rips are getting down to the very difficult ones (still a number of easy ones out there).
