Old Computer Game Music :b:

[El_Cid 10]

This thread will be dedicated to pre-movie quality games music and how to go about listening to it on modern pc harware.

 

Safe method of downloading - Always run a virus scan on anything you download online before you 'run' it, everything you can download in this thread has been checked with Avira, Avg and Norton scanners, but use your own antivirus on everything. I've not found any bad files on any of the sites i'll talk about below, but it pays to be safe.

 

Ok, so i've been a gamer since the early 80's, and over the last 20+ years i've spent gaming i've heard some great game music. An often underlooked aspect of a game by many developers, but some types of music can make a decent game a really great game.

 

In the modern era of film score quality game music, which can also be excellent, i miss the old-school sounds of midi, mod or 'sid chip' style blips and bloops.

 

I find when working, having some old game music in the back ground can often jog my memory and remind me of a great game/game feature.

 

So lets get on with it!

 

Players:

 

There are a whole bunch of players you can use to listen to older game music files, all come with positives and negatives and it will be down to personal preference to some extent. I'm just going to cover a couple i know work very well here, but feel free to give your suggestions.

 

1. Winamp - really the default alternative to windows media player, and has the advantage of many plugins you can add to allow a wide range of music files to be played. I guess this is the player i've used the most.

 

http://www.winamp.com/player/free.php

 

And these plugins:

 

http://www.winamp.com/plugins/details/144643

 

Sidplay2 - allows old C64 tracks to be played, although it wont auto shuffle to the next track, it will allow you to listen to all the songs in the one track(sometimes a .sid file will include more than one song).

 

http://www.winamp.com/plugins/details/2266

 

Oldsk00l Mod player - Allows many Amiga music tracks to be played, although not the .LHA types you often find on amiga game music sites.

 

http://www.chipamp.org/

 

Chipamp - console game(NES/GBA etc) music plugin for winamp.

 

http://asma.atari.org/ - scroll down to the 'player download' section and get this file:

 

SAP Winamp plug-in v2.2 - which will allow cool atari8bit .sap files to be played on winamp.

 

With these few plugins for Winamp, you get a pretty good choice and range of game music files to pick and play.

 

----------------------------------------

 

2. Deliplayer 2 - This is an old and now unsupported player, and be carefull where you download it from, many sites/downloads of it show up warnings via W.O.T and SiteAdvisor. The links i give below are good ones, one from CNET(for the slightly older version), and one from a less well known(but still safe) source, mpegx.com.

 

I started to get annoyed that Winamp would not move onto the next track after playing a .sid file, you have to manualy re-shuffle it, and gave this a go to see how it compared.

 

It does move onto the next track after playing a .sid file, so you don't have to babysit it like in winamp, *BUT it wont allow you to play all the songs within a .sid track. It did offer that in the paid for full version(which you can't get anymore), but not in the free version.

 

* Not actually entirely true - it won't automatically play(or even show) the subsongs in a .SID file but you can use 'right click>play>next subsong' to get to the other tracks. So if you have a .SID file you know has lots of subsongs you can listen to them all in the free player - you just have to babysit it and do it manually.

 

The upside is that Deliplayer allows you to play many more file formats than winamp, especially old game music file types. On balance for just having something play in the background that i can forget about and still get that old game music vibe, Deliplayer has won me over from Winamp. It's not 100% perfect, but it will open up a larger range of titles and download places for you to get those music tracks from.

 

http://download.cnet.com/DeliPlayer/3000-2139_4-10047734.html - v2.03(older version - best to use newer one linked to below).

 

And this clean download of the last version, Deliplayer v2.50 beta1:

 

http://www.mpegx.com/view.php?detail=536 - (I use this one now). - NOTE McAfee site advisor shows a yellow warning for this site - but it is not for the deliplayer 2.50 beta1 download. W.O.T reports it as green(safe). Virus scan everything, but i've not found a bad file yet during this experiment :)

 

plugins for Deliplayer:

 

*http://gbamiga.elowar.com/files/@Main/ - scroll down to 'Deliplayer Plugins(2007-12-30).zip' and download, follow the instructions in the zip files readme, and you get a bunch of extra amiga music format types recognized.

 

*this link is now dead, so see below for the attached 'Deliplayer Plugins(2007-12-30).zip' file

 

update: BUT as i've found out some of these new files will mess up some of the default Deliplayer ones, so you gain some but also loose some! So you have to experiment and see which of these new files doesn't 'break' something from the default Deliplayer 2 files(keep a backup of the default 'AmigaPlayers' and 'players' folders just in case).

As i work it out i'll post a list below of safe plugins to add to your Deliplayer2\AmigaPlayers folder, that doesn't break the default installed ones:

 

List of file types+plugin types required to be added to default Deliplayer2 install:

 

1. 'bd.' type - needs 'Ben Daglish' plugin e.g. 'Darkfusion.lha/bd.Dark Fusion'

2. 'mok.' type - needs 'Silmarils' plugin e.g. '/mok.Crystals of Arboria'

3. 'dl.' type - needs 'Dave Lowe' plugin e.g. 'Ghostbusters2.lha/dl.intro'

4. 'ss.' type needs 'Speedy System' plugin e.g. '/ss.down_at_the_trolls'

5. 'wb' type needs 'Wally Beben' plugin e.g. 'Elie\wb.Elite'

6. 'mc' type needs 'Mark Cooksey' plugin e.g. 'Gremlins2.lha/mc.title'

7. 'pap' type needs 'Pierre Adane Packer' plugin e.g. 'Ivanhoe.lha/pap.title'

8. 'rho' type needs 'Rob Hubbard ST' plugin e.g. 'Jupiter Probe.lha/rho.intro'

9. 'jt' type needs 'Jeroen Tel' plugin e.g. 'Onslaught.lha/jt.intro'

10. 'jpn' type needs 'Jason Page' plugin e.g. 'Realms.lha/jpn.title'

11. 'smus' type needs 'Sonic Music Drivers' plugin e.g. 'Spirit of Excaliber/smus.intro'

12. 'tiny' type also needs 'Sonic Music Drivers' plugin!

13. reserved!

 

I've used '.title' '.intro' where i dont remember the exact file name in the examples above.

 

Modplug Tracker: With this software you can overcome one of Deliplayers big weaknesses, lack of Midi(.mid) file playback. Get the program from here(clean download):

 

http://www.modplug.com/

 

Have a read of the program details, and it is very simple to use. Simply load in the midi(.mid) file you want and 'Save As...' which is a default .it(Impulse Tracker Module) small sized file that deliplayer can play....

 

Or for better quality 'Save as Wave' .wav type - larger file, higher quality.

 

Both .it and .wav can be played in Deliplayer - so you can convert all those great PC game midi files into something Deliplayer2 will play back! Cool! :b:

 

 

Game Music Sites:

 

There are a bunch of them but i will start with just a couple that link to many of the others:

 

http://www.lemon64.com/ - C64 dedicated website

 

http://www.lemonamiga.com/ - Amiga sister site for the above. click on 'links' and scroll down to the 'music' section link for many game music sites.

 

http://www.chiptune.com/ - lol, the whole website works like AmigaOS!! but if you can work it out there are a bunch of huge(as in many songs) music files to download. Once you get into the site, double click 'Chipbench 1.3'>'Data'>'Packs' and grab some tunes!

 

http://www.nemmelheim.de/cgs/ - good selection of Amiga based game soundtracks to download, in a rated system(gold+silver stars)....but grab whatever you like.

 

http://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/Main_Page - huge wiki based site dedicated to Amiga game(and other) music, sort by music format/game title etc, lots of tracks, but many in 'exotic' formats so your player may not play them all - even Deliplayer finds some unplayable, but this site is of most use for Deliplayer if you want to listen to original amiga game music as it can read the .lha files(which Winamp can't).

 

http://asma.atari.org/ - Awesome Atari8bit game music archive, download the 'Atari SAP music archive' and get over 2000 tunes! have fun sorting the ones you like!

 

http://www.amigamusic.com/ - cool site with Amiga game music in Mp3 format, but you need to enter a code for each download, so that slows it down. But good resource for Mp3 tracks.(seems to be down 'exceeded bandwidth!' - maybe backup later on?)

 

http://www.hvsc.c64.org/ - Awesome C64 sid chip game music archive, download thousands of SID tunes to listen to!

 

 

Chip tune Radio Stations:

 

I must admit i don't know a great deal about these, i tend to use players and store songs on my PC, but these are popular so i'll post the few i know about:

 

1. http://ocr.rainwave.cc/

 

You will need to register to log on.

 

2. http://www.slayradio.org/home.php

 

Requires javascript to load the player, but you can also download files.

 

3. http://vgremix.libsyn.com/

 

Again you need to allow javascript to listen to the player.

 

4. http://radio.emulationzone.org/chan6//index.php

 

Seems to be download only to get the music.

 

5. http://wruw.org/

 

Another download only site.

 

6. http://www.mazemod.org/

 

cool, simple to use site.

 

7. http://www.plopbox.net/

 

great, easy to use site.

 

8. http://www.8bitfm.com/

 

another great site.

 

Of these Slayradio, mazemod, plopbox and 8bitfm are my favourites(ease of use) :b:

 

Ok that is all for now, i will update this and add more and look forward to others input and links to places to go to hear all this great computer music.

DeliPlayer Plugins (2007-12-30).zip

Edited April 4, 2011 by El_Cid

[Metaliturtle 13]

on Pandora I have a few stations dedicated to video game music. Here are the names of the groups that get it:

 

The Minibosses - they do covers of old NES games

The Advantage - Also covers old NES games + from Milwaukee!

The Black Mages - This is the guy who wrote the music for all the Final Fantasy games, and he performs them with electric guitar and RAWK.

 

The best part though is that you can rate the songs, so if a non-video game song arises, you can give 'er the ol' :q:

[El_Cid 10]

Ah yes - old school game music radio stations! I've only come across a few, and was going to cover them in more detail as i found out more, so cheers for that link Metaliturtle :b:

 

EDIT: that station is for USA only based listeners!

[Metaliturtle 13]

Do you know of any others I could add?

[El_Cid 10]

Yeah - check back tomorrow and i should have had time to add some links :)

[Mr. Scruffy 10]

I have a little story to tell on this one - here is the short version of it:

 

So i thought back on old tunes, some 8 years ago - thinking about the zak mckracken intro tune. Googled it. Found some remixes. Browsed other songs. Found an awesome Maniac Mansion remix. Showed it to roomie. Roomie says: There lives a guy downstairs who makes such music. I go downstairs. Turns out, he is the guy who made that song. Check it out:

 

http://www.puffy64.de/html/index.html

 

(He did it alone, playing the four guitar parts in sequence in layers on top of each other)

 

Another remix i like: The zak mc kracken intro by the dead guys (not the ´mindbend this´ one) - On a related note: You ´outlanders´ might have missed it - there is quite a good fanproject for Zak Mc Kracken II - Beyond time and space. Only german AFAIK. Not perfect, but still quite good. Download it here: http://www.zak2.org

 

The ´MayBeBop´ ´remixes´ are great for their fun, too - Ever tried ´Commando´ in acapella? These guys did: [nomedia=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWZ84aA0Ji4]YouTube - MayBeBop - Commando[/nomedia]

 

They also did M.U.L.E. and others...

Edited June 15, 2009 by Mr. Scruffy

[El_Cid 10]

:b: I like the Last Ninja one, although i must admit i love the original tracks from computer games more than remixes, i guess it's part nostalgia, but it also helps me remember all those gamess :)

Edited June 15, 2009 by El_Cid

[El_Cid 10]

I've made some updates to the main post - info on getting more files to run under Deliplayer mostly - i'm having fun

[Maquiladora 10]

I stumbled on the Gunrunner music a few days ago, brings back some memories:

 

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxmUOd5soMs]YouTube - Gunrunner Spectrum Title[/ame]

[El_Cid 10]

Good memories?!!

 

Actualy thats not a bad song - and if you look in the 'other' offerings you tube displays at the bottom when it has finished gunrunner, you can listen to some other retro game songs :b:

[El_Cid 10]

Just did some updates to the main post as an important link is no longer working, so i've added the small file it linked to as an attachment here :)