Retro PC Game Music
 

I'm much fond of the old personal computer western sounds. The annoying thing is ... I never own a PC back then and thus never was a gamer on these platforms.

As I got into game music though, my love for minimalistic chiptunes drove me to such things as old Monkey Islands, Might and Magic, Ultima etc... recordings.

If there's one thing I know, it's that high quality MIDI MT32 recordings usually do nothing to me, whereas I can listen to the more bleep bleep based versions for hours. They put me in a certain mood, something both peaceful and mysterious ... anyway ...

If there's something I learned with time, it's that when you don't know about something, just ask about it. I don't know anything about old PC game music. I know names like Midis, Adlib, Roland and whatnot, but I'm afraid my conceptions of those are limited or just plain erroneous.

Will one of you old sentimental nerds enlighten me on the different formats, sonorities each sound cards / system had ? I'm strictly talking about 80's / mid 90's western personal computers here. Not the japanese counterparts. Oh, and not the Amiga / C64 ones either. I know how those sound. I don't have a great personal computer history, but would what I'm refering to only be IBM PCs ? =s

Posting sound samples would be cool ~

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edit: You know what? Sometimes things just happen in a funny way. I've been searching here and there for a good, understandable guide on the matter described above and ended up posting here because I didnt find what I wanted ... Well, the Quest Studio page ... it's not like I never visited it. I even go go there pretty often and download their Digital soundreacks (eventhough I usually don't like them much). But heh, look what I found, linked on their front page:

http://www.crossfire-designs.de/?lan...cle=soundcards

Ironic heh? Well I guess we can still keep that thread for discussion value. Wanna suggest good old soundtracks? From what I read so far it would seem I'm more of an Adlib person than a MIDI one, care to argue on that?

*goes back to his article

Can't say much, but you might like adlib.superfighter.com (I'm not allowed to post links here so copy/paste it yourself >_<)

Yeah heh found out about that one. The thing is, I have no experience with actual hardware, and all I have to judge are those emulated files and mp3 recordings from (suposedly) actual Adlib equiped systems.

And yeah, I'm not sure but the mp3 recordings seem to sound better to me. Is it just the songs I used for comparison? Bad emulation? I can't tell.

I'll upload a few samples, and hope an expert can confirm it's adlib or not.

(hi hi Dat =D )

edit: is this adlib ?

edit2: http://www.chiptune.de/ <- Got the Adlib archive here. There afain, it's difficult for me to tell how accurate the emulation is ...

edit3: oh well ya'll suck