I must have a very different taste in music, certainly when it comes to the Gradius III tracks. My 2 favs from that are Sand Storm and Cosmo Plant. But that game has a lot of good tracks!
My favorite (it's not really playable in MAME), but since it's port to the Sega Saturn is so close the arcade version... I know this might not have the 'chippiness' quality like the (true) arcade version would, but this has to be my favorite track.
eta: Off-Topic. I might as well mention... I had asked a long while back in the bin about an animation program or something about animating a large picture. I had taken snaps from Virtua Fighter of Dural's stage, cleaned them all up of character graphics, and stat graphics such as the life-bar, wins, timer, etc. When I was done I had a panoramic pic of that stage. I wanted to animate it so that it scrolled by slowly, Pretty much showing the whole stage background. I wanted to put this into a video and have it last around ...maybe 4 minutes. The other minute would be the Title screen, and a graphic of Dural. The different pics would fade into the next at certain times, but for the duration of the vid (while the music was playing) you'd get to watch this skyline scrolling by.
Italie had offered to do this (or to help me with it), but I felt it was a LOT of work for what I was wanting.