[Pell]

Wasn't entirely sure where to post this... I'm a composer who's collaborating with a friend on a play that's going to be set in the world of a Golden Age adventure game--bounded geography, barter economy, hilariously large inventory... the works. Naturally, I want the music to evoke that gaming experience. Does anyone have advice on the best way to do this? I guess it's kind of an open-ended question, since those games appeared on all kinds of systems over a long stretch of time. If I had to be specific, I'd guess I'd say I'm aiming for the music you'd hear playing an AGI Sierra game on an Apple IIGS in 1989. Or failing that, on a PC around 1992 with a Sound Blaster. I want folks to be able to hear the pixels, as it were.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated! My setup is pretty basic--I record with a combination of live audio and MIDI keyboard on Garageband, on a Mac laptop. Are there any MIDI plugins that do a good job of emulating these sounds? (There are tons that emulate 8-bit video game systems, presumably because the mechanics there were very simple.) I'm not too knowledgeable about how those old sound cards worked, or the software and file formats associated with them... though I suspect I'm going to have to start learning.

[Melanie68]

Welcome to AG!

I moved your thread to the Underground section. It seemed more suited to be there.

The play sounds really cool.

[Trumgottist]

Oh. This one was posted while I was absent from the forum, so I couldn't offer suggestions, but I'm interested in the result.

So… how did it end up? What did you use? FM-synths, or…?

[Pell]

Oh, golly, this was from a while ago. In the end I did some more research and downloaded Adlib Tracker, which took a little while to figure out. I'm running it on an ancient ThinkPad (I'm normally a Mac guy), but it's yielded some good results. Wish I had more time to play around with the software--the possibilities are endless! I'm going to try to post some samples of the music on YouTube and/or our Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=158844415264) in the next 24-48 hours.

I assume by FM synth you mean something like the Yamaha DX7. I was tempted, I have to say....

[Trumgottist]

Originally Posted by Pell

In the end I did some more research and downloaded Adlib Tracker, which took a little while to figure out. I'm running it on an ancient ThinkPad (I'm normally a Mac guy), but it's yielded some good results.

Interesting. The only Adlib Tracker I can find is a DOS program, though. Did you run it with Dosbox, or was it another program?

Wish I had more time to play around with the software--the possibilities are endless! I'm going to try to post some samples of the music on YouTube and/or our Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=158844415264) in the next 24-48 hours.

I'll be looking forward to it.

I assume by FM synth you mean something like the Yamaha DX7. I was tempted, I have to say....

I was thinking more of something like an AU or VST plugin, but the same sort of sound, yes. But isn't that true for the program you used, too? (I don't really know that much on the subject - I mainly play acoustic instruments.)

[Pell]

No, I'm running it on an old IBM laptop. For some reason it kept crashing on DosBox. So I play it out of the IBM and into Garageband on my Mac.

I'd originally tried to find a plug-in, but I don't think there's anything out there that can really do it justice--at least, anything that's free. The way the tracker works is actually pretty complicated. You're basically creating one waveform and then modifying it with a second waveform, each of which have all kinds of parameters you can play with. I don't fully understand the acoustics behind it, but the upshot is that you have a remarkably wide variety of colors you can create once you get handy with it. It's a fun exercise, though the interface is not especially elegant by today's standards.

Should have some music up either tonight or tomorrow.

[xenogia]

You could try finding some various vsts that plugin into say cubase/fruityloops that emulate old sound chips. There are definetly some out there, but it could become costly.

[robearth]

there are actually a lot of basic midisynths that sound very much alike the soundblaster in 92. I think you could just find a copy of windows 95 or an old soundblaster driver and there will be a midisynth somewhere in there that you could use with basically any musicprogram that has the abillity to choose from midisynths.
guitarpro will work fine for example.

otherwise I think it'd be cool if you had a real orchestera, doesn't have to be huge you know, -since the music you're trying to recreate didn't have a lot of instruments- and run every mic through a bitcrusher in Cubase or a Scream distortion in Reason. You can adjust just how much "pixelish" you want the sound to be : )

Anyway, good luck to you!