Epic Games 20th Anniversary Commemorative Soundtrack

[leilei]

What i'd do, is get an old ISA PC with a real OPL2/3-capable sound card with very little noise floor (good luck with that ), and use PLAYCMF with them while using another computer to record the sound. The Sound Blaster Pro's bundled PLAYCMF can output to stereo, though i'm still not sure if it was intended to be (especially with Solar Winds' soundtrack where some parts sound like intentional attempts at panned echo never heard in the actual game).

An easy way to produce ogg files is to use OggDrop, which takes WAV files.

[kilodude]

What i'd do, is get an old ISA PC with a real OPL2/3-capable sound card with very little noise floor (good luck with that ), and use PLAYCMF with them while using another computer to record the sound. The Sound Blaster Pro's bundled PLAYCMF can output to stereo, though i'm still not sure if it was intended to be (especially with Solar Winds' soundtrack where some parts sound like intentional attempts at panned echo never heard in the actual game).

An easy way to produce ogg files is to use OggDrop, which takes WAV files.

Thank you. I appreciate the tips.

[Malvineous]

Hey all - I've spent a lot of time getting an accurate CMF player working, so Allen if you're prepared to send me the CMF files I'd be more than happy to convert them into Ogg/FLAC or whatever anyone would like. It would also be great if we were able to share the CMF files themselves, as there are quite a few people around who collect game soundtracks in their original file formats, myself included, and having unreleased tracks is always very interesting!

As a side note, in case anyone is interested - the Xargon demo song actually has note velocities in it, so the repeating chord in the song is supposed to sound quieter on each 'echo' until it fades out to silence, but the game itself and the Creative Labs player both ignore note velocities and play each note at full volume. So if you use a CMF player that handles these velocity values, the song sounds somewhat different to how it does in the game, but presumably closer to what Dan Froelich intended.

[MrFlibble]

Hey all - I've spent a lot of time getting an accurate CMF player working, so Allen if you're prepared to send me the CMF files I'd be more than happy to convert them into Ogg/FLAC or whatever anyone would like. It would also be great if we were able to share the CMF files themselves, as there are quite a few people around who collect game soundtracks in their original file formats, myself included, and having unreleased tracks is always very interesting!

That would certainly be very cool

[kilodude]

Hey all - I've spent a lot of time getting an accurate CMF player working, so Allen if you're prepared to send me the CMF files I'd be more than happy to convert them into Ogg/FLAC or whatever anyone would like. It would also be great if we were able to share the CMF files themselves, as there are quite a few people around who collect game soundtracks in their original file formats, myself included, and having unreleased tracks is always very interesting!

Thanks. I appreciate it. I'll get to this within the next week. I'm working on a video project and a 3D game today.

[ejrt]

Hey all - I've spent a lot of time getting an accurate CMF player working,

Is this something that you've cobbled together yourself?

To record .CMF files, I've mostly resorted on a DOSBox-based scheme similar to Leilei's.

It's way easier to dub .ROL files, if you have them; I know that's that's the original format for Froelich's work from that era. AdPlug works just swell, and from there you can just write output to disk then encode the .WAV files to .MP3, .OGG, or whatever else you want.

[Malvineous]

Yes the CMF player is something I wrote myself. I also wrote the CMF player in AdPlug, but it's still not 100% perfect compared to SBFMDRV under DOS/DOSBox.

Getting the last bit figured out is proving to be exceedingly difficult. It's all to do with the way the instruments and note frequencies are set for rhythm-mode percussion instruments, so the percussion is often a little bit off. Kiloblaster's song_4 is the most obvious with this as you can hear it within the first few seconds of the song.

AFAIK .ROL files don't include instruments - correct me if I'm wrong - so a ROL version of a CMF file would sound completely different.

[ejrt]

Oh, they do have instrument patches. I've written enough of them to know! They're very similar to CMF in most respects. They just have a higher fidelity, for reasons beyond my knowledge.

.ROL version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7-dFv0kphE

.CMF version (through RSD's weird, degraded parser):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlK0YO5g-70

I didn't realize you were behind AdPlug. When the .CMF support works right it sounds great. I kind of have to take it on a case-by-case basis, though.

[Malvineous]

Hmm interesting - sorry I can't hear your videos, YouTube videos never have sound for me Do you have any documentation about .ROL files and patches? Granted I haven't looked much but I have never seen anything about .ROL patches before.

If you have any CMF files that sound obviously wrong in AdPlug please let me know, because the only ones I have sound just barely wrong so it can be quite tricky to figure out. I've made quite a few improvements since the AdPlug code (and these improvements will be included in Camoto) but there are still a couple of really tricky things to figure out.

[kilodude]

Hey all - I've spent a lot of time getting an accurate CMF player working, so Allen if you're prepared to send me the CMF files I'd be more than happy to convert them into Ogg/FLAC or whatever anyone would like. It would also be great if we were able to share the CMF files themselves, as there are quite a few people around who collect game soundtracks in their original file formats, myself included, and having unreleased tracks is always very interesting!

Thanks for being willing to convert these. I will leave it up to you as to which version you believe will best capture the essence of the songs. I prefer it to be as RAW as possible so I can have the originals and then create MP3s from those. That way I can throw them on my Droid.

Since the songs sound different in Winamp with AdPlug and because I do not have a list of which songs were actually used in the game, I am including all of the ones in the folder. AFAIK, these are all of the ones Dan sent me for Xargon. It's possible that I have some floppies somewhere that have other stuff or that it's on one of my old and disconnected optical drives, but these are all I have on my main system. I also have the files for Kiloblaster but I'll send those another time.

Have fun. Thanks.

[Malvineous]

Wow this is great, many thanks for posting them!

The songs that weren't used in the game are: Hooked, Jingle, Map and Stray. Interestingly with the exception of Map, these unused songs are dated 1990 and the others are all 1993.

I'll convert them to a few more common formats and post a link here when they're ready. I hope you're able to find the Kiloblaster ones too! I noticed a few of the KB songs showed up in Solar Winds too.

[spikey]

Awesome. I want to convert these to General MIDI sometime and record them with non-Adlib sounding instruments, but of course I love the original FM too, especially the synth lead in the title theme.

Allen, you rock!! I LOVE the journals; I wish some of my heroes from Sierra On-Line had kept such things, although most have been forthright about the old days.

[kilodude]

Wow this is great, many thanks for posting them!

The songs that weren't used in the game are: Hooked, Jingle, Map and Stray. Interestingly with the exception of Map, these unused songs are dated 1990 and the others are all 1993.

I'll convert them to a few more common formats and post a link here when they're ready. I hope you're able to find the Kiloblaster ones too! I noticed a few of the KB songs showed up in Solar Winds too.

There are several possibilities regarding the four songs because I didn't know Dan in 1990 and he didn't make my songs for "Kiloblaster" until 1992:

1) These were songs he already had and sent them to me as samples.
2) My CMOS battery died (used to happen a lot in the 90s) and that is not the actual date.
3) His CMOS battery died - okay, you get the idea.
4) An alien put them there so that 20 years later we would be stumped as to what they were.

I'm going to go with #1 because these are songs written by other people - except "Map" which actually was done in 1993.

[kilodude]

Awesome. I want to convert these to General MIDI sometime and record them with non-Adlib sounding instruments, but of course I love the original FM too, especially the synth lead in the title theme.

Allen, you rock!! I LOVE the journals; I wish some of my heroes from Sierra On-Line had kept such things, although most have been forthright about the old days.

Again, thank you for the kind words.