Sunday, April 5, 2009

Happy Goat: The Internet catches up to you!

So, it's around 1994-1995 or so, and the Atari Jaguar has been released. Arguably, the one game everyone remembers when someone mutters Atari Jaguar is Tempest 2000, aka T2K.

Along with the intense graphics (hey, for the time, they were incredible), and gameplay, was the screaming soundtrack compliments of Imagitec Design.

These tracks are MOD files. I then come across a DOS-based (remember DOS?) mod player... Add a mini-disc player/recorder because I couldn't record audio directly to wav/mp3 on my system via DOS. Mix the track in realtime! Playback the minidisc to record an audio file via line-in on my system. Email to a friend of mine running an Atari Jaguar related website ... and many, many years later -- it shows up on YouTube!

4 comments:

  1. Heh... I'm interested to know how you got the MODs off the Jaguar cartridge? If it was the PC version then you'd either have had MIDI files (for the SINGLE FLOPPY! version of the game... Minter doesn't make bloatware :D), or straight CDDA audio tracks for the CDROM version (which was all of 1.4mb of data in a ~15 second silent/random noise "track 1"). At the time I can understand trying to record audio direct from the CD drive in the PC would have been tricky (mixed bag of results for myself, certainly), driving you to use the line-out (either of the PC, or the Jag, or a home CD player) but it's nothing to do with MODs.

    Still got my own MP3s of the game's soundtrack rattling around in my player to this day, incidentally. Whatever happened to distinctive game music that also held up as recognisable and enjoyable pieces by themselves? It all seems to be generic cod-classical or elevator rock at the moment. Viva la renaissance...

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  2. Hi -

    Sorry for taking so long to reply. Been a busy couple of months.

    At the time, the MODs were made available on the net. I used a DOS-based MOD player to do the mix, but, I couldn't find a way to output audio from the computer other than using a mini-disc recorder to record. Plus the fact the computer I was using was like x086 =o), it wasn't as sophisticated as the computers we have today.

    The quality of the audio capture leaves MUCH to be desired and give the track the justice due.

    I have since revisited these tracks and through the evolution of computing and software tools available, have re-done the "The T2K Mix" and the other Tempest 2000 tracks --

    If interested, feel free to visit: http://www.youtube.com/jag731

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  3. Now if I could only remember the first-person shooter that came out early on the PlayStation (1) which had about 9 awesome music tracks on the disc...

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  4. Not sure if you've tried this, but one of my favorite places to find game music:
    http://downloads.khinsider.com/

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