Here’s some music from the totally crazy arcade rail shooter Carnevil
The first two tracks are recreations by myself.
Carnevil Soundtrack
Jan 9
Happy 2023!
Jan 9
Hi all.. Still here. Hoping to finally make some updates/changes/refreshes around here this year! Stay tuned…
The last several years have been a doozy! Frankly more than I could really go into Needless to say Family and Work has occupied most of my time.
But to go over some somewhat on-topic things to discuss here’s a bit of what I’ve been doing over the last several years; I’ve spent a large amount of time on several different things I hope to share down the road.
- I’ve built two full-height racks to house all of my audio/midi gear and some of my computers with a nice desk in the middle.
- Spent a lot of time playing with Raspberry Pi’s
- I have an “MT-32 Pi” which is really cool, but sadly misplaced it.. .. It must be around here somewhere…
- I have a dosbox setup that plays many games with which I’ve dabbled in creating a basic menu system to allow selection of various MIDI Emulations (like MT-32/MUNT) and real midi hardware.
- I’ve been quite busy with retro/console gaming and emulation.
- Raspberry Pi: RetroPie – both standard rPi’s and things like the Retroflag GPi handheld.
- Have collected a respectable amount of official Retro/Mini consoles most of which have been modded by now.
- NES Classic, SNES Classic, Genesis Mini 1 & 2, NeoGeo Mini, NeoGeo Arcade Stick Pro, Playstation Classic, TurboGrafx 16 Mini, Sega Astro City Mini (original and Vertical Version), Taito Egret 2 Mini. The Nintendo Game & Watch Mario & Zelda variants. FUN!
- PC-based Retrogaming build based on the INCREADIBLE VirtualMan Retro-Bliss Level Up 3.5
- Loving the Valve Steam Deck and Emu-Deck.
- Spending time with my family
- Amateur Photography
That’s all for now. Hoping to update more frequently going forward.
Cheers!
Andrew
Thanks to some of our forum members, we have added the missing track “The Tavern” to the Hero’s Quest / Quest for Glory 1 Digital Soundtrack page!
Thanks again Goatmeal1 for the MP3 and Ari for the OGG!
Hi all! I know it’s been forever since I updated the site… Hopefully more frequent updates will follow.
I’ve added some new MIDI file pages! They are still in progress from a formatting/aesthetics perspective, but the functionality is pretty much all in place.
- Larry, the Complete MIDI Soundtrack Collection!
- Betrayal at Krondor, MIDI Soundtrack Collection!
- The Adventures of Willy Beamish MIDI Collection (This page was created earlier, manually as a prototype for the player)
- CODE-NAME: ICEMAN, MIDI Soundtrack Collection!
These new MIDI File pages contain a real-time midi player PolyWave AKA MUKI, with MT-32 playback capability as well as GM playback via SoundFonts.
Additionally, the original ZIP files for the MIDI downloads are also listed. 🙂 These are the unaltered original ZIP’s from the original QuestStudios website.
One thing that’s taken this project so long (apart from real-life putting many things on hold for the last several years) has also been dealing with accounting for many of the little discrepancies in the original ZIP files, like typo’s and going through everything to match it up for the website so that everything works.
Another part of this project has been taking all that disparate data and converting it into something more flexible web-code wise. Below is a quote from a message board post I wrote a while ago on the subject.
It’s a looong time coming.
Myself, from the site’s message board.
I’ve been working on the framework for those pages on and off for a long time.
I want not just to be able to provide the original QS midi zips for download, but also have them playable in the web browser, or even on a mobile/phone on-the-go. This presents several problems, the the main one being the playback of MT-32 music or MIDI music in general. “How to do it?” and “How to do it without it sounding like garbage?”. I could just make recordings of everything, but that’s bandwidth intensive, and time consuming. Thankfully, Tomas Pollak’s Polywave AKA Muki.io solves this problem wonderfully with a great implementation of MUNT, a more than adequate Soundfont-based engine for GM, as well as being a great MIDI/chip-tune player in general! I’ve had a number of great and extensive chats with Tomas about the player, some of the playback quirks I ran into, as well as some feature suggestions.
On top of all that, I also wanted to have the website code handle all of this in a more easy to manage way. There is a long story of what I did to automate the parsing the original QS Zip file contents, to match all the track names to their actual file names, many of which did not quite match or had typos in them in some cases, as well as determine what type of synth is needed, and to determine if a patch bank file was needed in case of MT-32 MIDI’s. Ultimately, I was able to create a workflow that accomplishes this and puts it all into JSON, which is what Polywave uses also. I actually extended Polywave’s playlist JSON template for my own site so that I can include track names, synth information, patch banks, file locations/URLs, and other info into the site, without now having to actually make a ton of individual pages with tons of hyperlinks manually. I am pretty pleased with the result and the potential. Again the goal experience I had envisioned for the QSA was that it be something that allows me to browse and listen to any of the tunes I want from any device on any platform.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the new MIDI file pages, there are many more coming. Stay tuned!
Howdy all.
As always, sorry for the lack of frequent updates on the site. I know it seems like an empty promise, but I am always trying to find more time to put into the site here. Life just keeps one occupied elsewhere sometimes…
Anyway… I was recently having a some fun with the awesome Roland Cloud! Loving the D-50 virtual synth. I’ve compared it side-by-side to my real one and I can’t tell the difference!
Here is a quick little remix from Zeliard using mainly the Roland D-50 with some Virtual Sound Canvas, and TR-909; All virtual instruments from Roland Cloud.
Cheers!
Andrew