#Simcity 2000 soundtrack mod#
#Simcity 2000 soundtrack software#
#Simcity 2000 soundtrack Pc#
#Simcity 2000 soundtrack plus#

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.'Edith''s name came from Edith Bunker - the word-of-mouth (and, more realistically, articles plus the own SimAntics wiki) have it that she was the #1 Sim ever made for the game, sometime in 1997, in a not-so-shiny prototype for a pre-EA The Sims whimsically titled as 'Jefferson', a minimalist shout-out to USA's former president. Even better would be Flash + tracked music, but that never became an industry standard, shamefully. Today MIDI is not even used in Flash animations, where it would fit.which I consider a shame. 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).

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. 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. Thus, this system was abandoned a few years later, also because the rest of the data like graphics, videos etc. 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. Simple, little CPU overhead, top-quality, hardware independence (you didn't even need a soundcard for the music). However this soon came to an end with the introduction of mainstream, cheap CD-ROM units, and many companies just moved to CD-Audio. 8-channel sound including music would probably take some 15-20% of CPU time on a 486DX/66 CPU. The most common tracker sound system outside of Epic Megagames titles was however the AMF library (don't recall the author). It would surely be more taxing than OPL sound, but not impractically so.

#Simcity 2000 soundtrack mod#

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).

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. and stuff ported from the Amiga), however most games just used MIDI in the form of XMI (very few titles used plain. 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. 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 the Adlib, along with some lesser experiments like the CMS.and then the SoundBlaster.

#Simcity 2000 soundtrack Pc#

The case with music production on the PC is very weird:Īt first there was literally nothing (or just the PC speaker). So it was perfectly acceptable to use MIDI back then.much less processor load, and an acceptable (at the time) source of music. 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. 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. 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. 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.

#Simcity 2000 soundtrack software#

It is true that nowadays, software synths are pretty advanced and the intent portrayed in the music can be more clearly demonstrated.