Your favorite PC games with midi soundtrack

[Jimmy]

What games have you heard awesome midis in?

Mirsoft.info is a gold mine for awesome midi soundtracks to nostalgic games like Blood, Descent, Demonstar, Xenophage, and even little underrated puzzle games like the Microsoft Puzzle Collection and Lemmings Paintball which all have freakin' fantastic midi soundtracks. :P

3D Movie Maker is another fun little application that has quite a good midi soundtrack but nowhere on the web seems to offer just the midis. They were stored in the program itself so there was no way for me to copy and paste them to a directory on my own hard drive. :/

Still, what midis in games have you found to be mind-bendingly sawesome?

[Patrick]

The most awesome MIDI ever was on that 2D pinball that came with Windows 95.

There was a Galaga Clone for DOS a long time ago that had a kick ass tune in it. Don't remember the name right off the top of my head.

[Maes]

The Hylia is even more jam-packed with Game Midis, not only from the PC platform.

If we were to stick with PCs however, including those using non-standard MIDI formats such as XMI etc....I'd go with:

Commercial Games:

Indianapolis 500: The Simulation
FIFA International Soccer
Lotus III
Truxton
Pinball Dreams
Prehistoric
Cool Croc Twins
Doom
Dune II
Warcraft II (the DOS version had an option for MIDI music)
and many, many others
Body Blows (although that was using the AdLib directly, with effects impossible with plain MIDI)
Larry Games
Loom
Solar Winds
Peter Box
Continuum
LOGiCAL

and many, many others.

[jute]

Quest for Glory 1-4, especially 4. I've always been partial to the Wolf3D soundtrack too.

[Mithral_Demon]

Heroes of Might and Magic series got a decent track, as much as it is a Strategy.

StarCraft and WarCraft has decent tracks too.

[Jimmy]

Patrick said:

The most awesome MIDI ever was on that 2D pinball that came with Windows 95.

Oh, if that's the one I think you mean, then yes. :D

(Although the one I recall came with a Microsoft Pinball game on an XP machine.)

[TimeOfDeath]

There's one song from Duke Nukem 3D that I really like - I don't know what level it is, but it was used on map10 of av.wad.

[Jimmy]

TimeOfDeath said:

There's one song from Duke Nukem 3D that I really like - I don't know what level it is, but it was used on map10 of av.wad.

"Plasma"? Ew. Sorry, I'm fecking tired of that one now. =/ It's completely overused and doesn't even play properly in modern ports sometimes.

The DN3D soundtrack is good but after hearing it so many times, it's kind of lost its edge with me. :(

[Malinku]

well I really like the music form Jazz Jackrabbit
I never played it though just heard the music from it.

[Maes]

Malinku said:

well I really like the music form Jazz Jackrabbit
I never played it though just heard the music from it.

But that's not MIDI. If we expand the range with tracked music, then the whole scenery changes.

[TimeOfDeath]

Jimmy - yes, I'm still in love with that song. :)
Do you know what level it plays on Duke3D? I played Duke a long time ago but never recognized the song when I played av. And what's up with it not repeating properly in wads (it annoys me too)?

[Reisal]

Besides Doom and Doom II, I would have to toss in Ultima 8: Pagan and Raptor.

Raptor has some really nice songs but they are really short since it's a top-down aircraft side scroller.

[Jimmy]

TimeOfDeath said:

Do you know what level it plays on Duke3D? I played Duke a long time ago but never recognized the song when I played av. And what's up with it not repeating properly in wads (it annoys me too)?

E2L8 - Dark Side.

I think the song is constructed weirdly. It uses a special midi controller that makes it loop back to the middle of the song when played back with Duke or Doom's midi synth.

Plus Lee Jackson duplicates nearly all of the tracks in his songs so that they play a different instrument in FM synth, which might explain the way it sounds out of key in some ports. :S

[Patrick]

Well, understanding that these aren't midis (But close enough, really) I loved the techno tracks in Unreal Tournament. Really set the atmosphere for some of those levels.

[Whoo]

Doom
Realms of Chaos(Though the game was fairly bad)
Duke Nukem 3d
Bio Menace
Blake Stone

There's several more, though I'm not able to name the dozens of DOS games that I have played in the last 10 years.

[Fletcher`]

Malinku said:

well I really like the music form Jazz Jackrabbit
I never played it though just heard the music from it.

While I totally agree, Jazz's music wasn't MIDI. It was s3m which is basically another form of MOD.

[Nomad]

My favorite soundtracks from older games were actually stuff with richer music like Epic Pinball, Jazz Jackrabbit, and One Must Fall: 2097. Epic has always had great composers for their games.

[Malinku]

Maes said:

But that's not MIDI. If we expand the range with tracked music, then the whole scenery changes.

I didn't know that :P
but I change to Raptor: call of the shadows then.
even though it has only a few midis

[Mindless Rambler]

Descent and Descent II

and

Mithral_Demon said:

StarCraft and WarCraft has decent tracks too.

StarCraft didn't use MIDI and I believe that WarCraft used CD audio for music.

[Ralphis]

SimCity 2000

[Ultraboy94]

well i havent really played many games with midis, besides doom obviously.

ive played doom, duke nukem 3d and wolfenstein 3d as games with good midis. i know that carmageddon has midi soundtrack, but i cant get the music to play in dosbox.

ive never played rise of the traid, but some of the tracks in it i do like.

[Sharessa]

Not sure which ones were MIDI, but anything by Bobby Prince, the Raptor soundtrack, and Sim City 2000. Was ROTT done by Bobby Prince too? Because that was also awesome. I think I have all of those (except Sim City 2000) on my HD somewhere. Don't really listen to MIDIs, though.

[Aliotroph?]

ROTT was by Bobby Prince and Lee Jackson I think. I'm listening to some of that right now. :D

Warcraft II indeed had some good MIDI tracks. Whoever wrote that music also did such a good job recording the CD audio versions of them that most people thought it was performed with an orchestra. Fools!

Daggerfall has has some nice tunes. The game even has two versions of a lot of them: one for FM and one for everything else.

And to make the list nice and long:

Duke Nukem II
Duke Nukem 3D
Wolfenstein 3D
DooM
Spear of Destiny
Heretic (for about two songs)
Hexen
Hexen II
Blake Stone
Dune
Dune II
Star Trek: 25th Anniversary
Star Trek: Judgment Rites
Descent
Elements

[Eponasoft]

None. I've always hated MIDI. Not the standard, but the common file format. Or more like, I hate how it's generally represented...it's so device-dependent that it becomes nearly impossible to keep any kind of control over the intent of the game it's being used in. Music in a game isn't just for filler; a proper game developer knows that music, when used correctly, is designed to elicit a specific response from the player. Music "talks" to your emotions directly. Using a MIDI soundtrack can easily disrupt this most basic concept and ruin the intent. The only reason MIDI was really even used in the past was because the files are small and can rely on the hardware, freeing up a considerable amount of main memory. Fortunately, that is no longer an issue.

[wildweasel]

Descent's soundtrack always worked really well for me, and most of LucasArts' iMuse stuff really fit perfectly into the games (Monkey Island 2's catchy tunes, Day of the Tentacle's cartoony feel, etc).

ROTT's soundtrack, too, is loaded with tons of great tracks.

[myk]

Eponasoft said:
it's so device-dependent that it becomes nearly impossible to keep any kind of control over the intent of the game it's being used in.

I think that in games like DOOM, the format grants the huge benefit of working like "open source music" that can easily be edited, like low-res graphics or a simple map format, which offsets any loss in that department. Besides, if you really want to to control how MIDI music will sound, in general, for a specific game, you can use a software synthesizer, such as TiMidity, and include the corresponding instrument patches.

[Eponasoft]

It is true that nowadays, software synths are pretty advanced and the intent portrayed in the music can be more clearly demonstrated. But at the same time, even with this, there are superior formats available now...and really, were back then as well...but it was considerably harder to use other formats back in the DOOM days. Imagine playing a 16 channel S3M soundtrack alongside DOOM on a 386 with a Soundblacter Pro...you'd probably get about 6 frames per second if you were lucky. There was no hardware mixing for most of those old cards (Gravis Ultrasound was the exception, and I think the Disney SoundSource was capable of hardware mixing too but I don't quite remember), so all of that had to be done in software, in realtime, which took a lot of power. You generally had to use XMS or EMS memory as well, which meant switching processor modes continuously...a real cycle-killer for CPU-heavy games like DOOM which were already switching modes. So it was perfectly acceptable to use MIDI back then...much less processor load, and an acceptable (at the time) source of music.

[EarthQuake]

No one mentions Wacky Wheels? :(

[Nomad]

I haven't played Wacky Wheels in such a long time, I couldn't say I remembered any of the music. At least it hasn't stuck with me as long as some older games. For example, I haven't played Zone 66 in forever (and for that matter only ever played the demo), but every so often find myself humming the theme.

[Maes]

The case with music production on the PC is very weird:

At first there was literally nothing (or just the PC speaker). Then the Adlib, along with some lesser experiments like the CMS...and then the SoundBlaster. The most efficient way to produce multichannel music was the Adlib and SB FM Synth, although the formats used were not pure midi (there were literally dozens of proprietary "adlib tracker" formats).

Then around 1991-92 tracked music became a staple of the demoscene, and around 1993-1995 many games started using it too (mostly Epic Megagames titles, and some commercial games like Aladdin, the Lion King etc. and stuff ported from the Amiga), however most games just used MIDI in the form of XMI (very few titles used plain .MID files).

I always wondered if Doom would be viable with a tracked soundtrack back in the day, considering how well Epic's titles and the demoscene did with it.

In terms of CPU power required, there were some very efficient MOD players back then, with an extreme example being Galaxy MOD player, able to output 4-channels, 8-bit, 22 KHz on an 8 MHz XT (yeah, you read that right). It would surely be more taxing than OPL sound, but not impractically so. The most common tracker sound system outside of Epic Megagames titles was however the AMF library (don't recall the author). 8-channel sound including music would probably take some 15-20% of CPU time on a 486DX/66 CPU.

However this soon came to an end with the introduction of mainstream, cheap CD-ROM units, and many companies just moved to CD-Audio. Simple, little CPU overhead, top-quality, hardware independence (you didn't even need a soundcard for the music). However this took up an awful lot of space, in an era where hard disks were not large enough to store 1 or 2 CD without thinking it over, and most of the game had to reside on and be run from the CD.

Thus, this system was abandoned a few years later, also because the rest of the data like graphics, videos etc. had grown in size, and there was a short comeback to MIDI, use of sub-CD quality uncompressed audio, and the first attempts to use real-time compressed audio. Tracker music made a brief return with Unreal (and Unreal Tournament?) but by then, compressed audio had all but taken over, and this continues up to this day.

MIDI for games was already seldom used by the end of the 90s, save for a few rare titles (Warlords Battlecry used MIDI music, but in STG format). Today MIDI is not even used in Flash animations, where it would fit...which I consider a shame. Even better would be Flash + tracked music, but that never became an industry standard, shamefully. Most books about computer music that I've read don't even mention it, and the few that do have it maybe under a heading as a "weird" parenthesis with limited applications and no standardization.