BeebOPL choons

[SarahWalker]

As I've just received my BeebOPL, I figured I should start releasing music conversions for it! First up is Xargon, an odd 1993 DOS shareware platformer from Epic. There's probably the odd bug in my CMF player, but it mostly seems okay from what I can tell. Should work on BBC B upwards.

[JudgeBeeb]

I checked and double-checked my records and I am quite certain that I posted the kit to you on 25 October. So the earliest you could possibly have received it was on 26 October. That's just four days ago.

How on Earth have you managed to assemble it and then proceed to produce this piece of software in such a short period of time? It has taken me months to get a decent DRO player. And DRO files are orders of magnitude simpler to decode than CMF files. And you've got graphics and stuff too!

Good choice of music to showcase what the card is capable of, BTW.

Edit: Also, just noticed that when you manually change tracks, the previous track nicely fades out before the next one starts...

[SarahWalker]

Next it's a conversion of ubiquitous Puzznic rip-off Brix, and its lesser known registered version. I made a few bugfixes to the CMF player for this, so I'll probably update the Xargon conversion at some point.

[JudgeBeeb]

That's really cool. Is there any chance you would be prepared to share the source file (just for my education)?

BTW, if you press the arrow keys during playback, you get corrupted data at the top of the screen.

On a related note, I would really like to hear the music from Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (which has a special significance for me). Unfortunately, it seems as if the music is baked into a huge data file and I cannot find any information about the format or how to extract it.

[Scoobyatgb]

This looks great down our club with have built one kit out of four so far how do you make your own music for this kit

[SarahWalker]

That's really cool. Is there any chance you would be prepared to share the source file (just for my education)?

You have a PM!

[Commie_User]

If these are for the FM chipset, is there any chance of an MP3?

[SarahWalker]

You could just look on YouTube for soundtracks to the games in question. They sound the same on BeebOPL as they do on an AdLib/Sound Blaster.

[JudgeBeeb]

how do you make your own music for this kit

It depends what you want to do. Programming it is not particularly intuitive, but once you get your head round the way the registers work, it shouldn't be too hard to write something in BASIC that could play simple tunes. I wrote something very (very) crude in BASIC a while back that allowed you to play around with changing the values in various registers in order to experiment with the different sounds it could make.

On the other hand, if you want to make 'proper' music you are going to need a decent tracker or composition program. Try using Reality AdLib Tracker or AdLib Visual Composer - both of which run in DOS (or DOSBox) and then porting the resultant composition over to the Beeb.

[SarahWalker]

This week's offering is Jill of the Jungle, 1992's predecessor to Xargon (the two games use the same engine). More notable for the number of colours on the screen than for any real qualities as a game, sadly. It does have some reasonable music though.

[JudgeBeeb]

Stuck in a boring hotel in Preston on an even more boring job. Will have to wait until I get back to London before i can listen this.

[Arcadian]

Fabulous choice of choonz! Used to love playing (and probably moreso, listening to) Jill and Xargon on my 386!

Don't think I've heard the Brix 2 music but I'll avoid searching for the tracks on Youtube and will wait until I've got a BeebOPL up and running with my Master instead!

[JudgeBeeb]

I really like this latest one. Clearly written by someone who fully understood the chip and was playing to its strengths. Apparently the composer was one Dan Froelich. He also wrote the music for Brix, but this is far superior.

Do please keep these coming.

[SarahWalker]

Today's music disc is of 1993's Solar Winds, a sort of weird space opera type thing. I seem to remember quite enjoying it, though I never got very far. Anyway, some nice tunes, which did force me to fix a number of bugs in the player...

Solar_Winds_BeebOPL.zip

(22.4 KiB) Downloaded 132 times

[JudgeBeeb]

I'm still 'oop North' with my kit packed up in my boot at the moment. So will have to wait until I get back to London to listen to this latest batch.

Meanwhile, I managed to get the basics of an OPL3 card 'sort of' working in Bolton. Unfortunately, I don't seem to be able to get the second set of registers to behave themselves. I am going to try playing around with the code when I get some more free time, but I may need to call upon your expertise Sarah to help me out.

[JudgeBeeb]

When the Ad Lib Sound Card was first released, users who went to the trouble of completing and returning the registration card were rewarded with a bonus disc of additional tunes. That bonus disc is now available for BeebOPL...

As the lavatory attendant at Victoria Station once said to me: "Enjoy!":

bonus.zip

(49.31 KiB) Downloaded 126 times

[Arcadian]

My BeebOPL is up and running now so am eagerly looking forward to the possibility of more 'choons'!

Sarah, is Overkill (another early Epic Megagames release) a candidate? Does it use a similar format to the tracks above?

[SarahWalker]

Doesn't look like it I'm afraid...

[Arcadian]

Ah that's a shame, then again I suppose the Overkill music doesn't really sound anything like the Jill/Xargon themes so it's hardly surprising.

I suppose there's always the option for me to rip them to DRO format with Dosbox if I'm that desperate to hear them playing on my Beeb!

[SarahWalker]

Today's offering is Kiloblaster, another Epic shareware game with music by Dan Froelich. Probably the last one, in fact, as I think I've released them all now! I'd like to offer some commentary on the game, but I've actually never played it. Some nice tunes though.

[Arcadian]

Another one! Thanks! Downloaded!

I played Kiloblaster a little bit back in the day but can't remember much about it, I certainly can't remember the music so will look forward to checking this one out.

Btw according to this page the PC version of Dynablaster used CMF format: would it be relatively easy to convert the tracks for use with your player? (Speaking of CMF I hadn't realised just how few games used the format until I'd read that page!)

[SarahWalker]

Interesting, thanks for linking to that site! If Dynablaster is using CMF then it should be pretty trivial to convert.

[Arcadian]

Have been doing some more reading up on games that used CMF format - here are rips for Pea Shootin' Pete - a Pang-style game from 1994. Only four tracks though, co-written by Dan Froelich with David Bredesen.

[Arcadian]

Aha, going back to Dynablaster it seems that the VGMPF site has already extracted the tracks from the music.dat file and made them available as separate CMFs:
http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/images/c/c9/D ... DOS%29.zip

And for reference, VGMRips hosts the tracks in VGM format too:
https://vgmrips.net/files/PC/Dyna_Blast ... _AT%29.zip

[SarahWalker]

Since I can't say no to an Arcadian request, here's DynaBlaster. I never actually played the PC version of this back in the day. To be honest, I think I prefer the Amiga version...

[SarahWalker]

And, since it's Christmas, here's a second disc! This is of Wacky Wheels, which I did play a lot back in the 90s, mainly due to not having Mario Kart. It's got some quite good tunes I think.

Note that it's the first conversion that doesn't entirely fit in 32k! I had to crop Turbo a bit, and both Turbo and Overdrive will partly load over the screen. It's also a first in that it's not in CMF format - Wacky Wheels uses KLM format, which I don't think was really used by any other games.

[JudgeBeeb]

Having singularly failed (again) to get my OPL3 project to play nice, I have taken the time to add another of the official Ad Lib Music Albums. This time, we have a bit of culture in the form of Classical Favourites #1. As always, an alternative version, designed to run on systems where PAGE is higher than &1900 is available on GitHub.

Please note that this is a double sided disk image, designed to run from drives 0 and 2.

[JudgeBeeb]

Bug (hopefully) corrected

[JudgeBeeb]

All four Jukebox discs (so far )

[flaxcottage]

Thanks for the zipped file. They all download and install correctly unlike the versions on GitHub, which for me do not download properly.

An example is the High memory address Droplay ssd. When downloaded this is 31.4K in size which is clearly wrong. The disc image loaded into BeebEm or a real BBC appears as ...

No idea what is going wrong here. Could you also post the Droplay ssd zipped on the forum too?