MIDI is your friend...

Wow I've just found a technique that will save me literally months of time and toil with these arrangements.

I started to look on the net for MIDI files of the various third act tunes (anything Sonic or Mario related), and just for a laugh tried to open them in Sibelius 4.

Not only did they open perfectly but I could then see the relationship between parts, and shoehorn them into the existing instrumentation in my ensemble.

I'm pretty sure not only will this lead to far more accurate and faithful arrangements of the traditional game tunes, but will save me lots of man-hours within this process.

I'd like to point out that I am not taking credit for sequencing the original MIDI files - that remains the work of the invaluable many without whom I could not have started this project (not without an extra year to transcribe all the pieces). I'll trawl the net at some point and credit them all.