It was summer 2004. Impulse Corporation visited Meits with the idea to create Near Dark 33⅓. Then they realized it was almost 10 years ago Soepfiskje came out. In the meanwhile SMD was already working on a music disk player which was more suitable to host a Soepfiskje remake. Therefore the Near Dark 33⅓ went into the fridge. Sadly to never get out.
This episode was going to contain all the music from the original Soepfiskje which were still listenable with some additional new tracks. All with Moonsound.
Meits didn't have his real MSX setup at that time, so all tracks were rearranged using openMSX. At that time it was a terrible mistake. On real hardware every track sounded different. This was unknown until the day of release.
At the Bussum fair in 2004, MRC was so kind to share Near Dark a meter of their stand. Snout would arrange some hardware and Impulse Corporation would supply the disks.

The disks arrived in time, but it would take hours for Snout to show up. In the meanwhile there was a Sony 700, a color screen and a Moonsound available. Some speakers were found in the computer class room, some doors further down the hall. Still they lacked a keyboard. This was not an immediate problem, since SMD programmed a special booth-version which auto played. Only downside was that one had to push a key in the intro to get to the replayer. Repairbas was kind enough to lend one of his space bars in cases of emergency.
Meits was very annoyed that his music sounded totally off on real hardware. This made him fix all the tracks at home and uploaded it as a patch to MRC. Hopefully no more faulty versions are around anymore now. One big plus to this adventure was that Meits finally got his Moonsound repaired at the Sunrise booth and would never use an emulator again to make music. Just never forget: The real deal is the bench mark.
The unsold copies of the disk went into the web store of MRC as a big "thank you" for the meter of table space. Half a year later, the disk became freeware.

Trivia

• Meits remade the 3 MOA tracks and sent MOA MP3s of it for further suggestions until MOA was satisfied.
• As a disk filler there's a ZIP archive with some photos of Wolf's cat.
• Impulse Corporation was responsible to soup up the tune Always Ultra.
• The VU bars are stereo and volume sensitive.

Credits

• SMD (graphics, ideas, code)
• Meits (music)
• Impulse Corporation (music)
• Wolf (intro graphics conversion)