History Lessons #3 : Music part 2

Been a little while huh? Well still alive, and here for more. Today I decided to continue on the music side of the gaming evolution. Last time I went through the MIDI standard. This system was used in most consoles up to the NES, as systems would have their built-in instruments and/or sounds. Only a few exceptions had some samples on the cartridge, mainly voice samples. The next generation brought numerous changes.

Starting with the SNES era, games started to increase their size, and allowed for a new system for music to be used. Sound samples would be stored on the cartridge, and then read at different pitch and speed to simulate instruments. This was called Modulating. This system is still in use in newer generation consoles, although thanks to better compression and higher CPU power they are also able to use higher quality sound files (like MP3s) in certain games instead.

When I hopped on the internet some 10 years ago, one of my main interest was collecting these music of games. That's where I learned about these different systems for music. There was a website, now defunct, that concentrated on collecting these files, and then fanarts and stories. It would eventually evolve into what is today's RPGamer, but at the time it mainly concentrated on Final Fantasy music, since it was such an inspirational source.

Similar to MIDI files, most of the music files hosted were fan created. This was well before the MP3s and small file sizes. At the time, a CD-quality 3 minute song could easily take upward of 25 megabytes. That looks ridiculously small with today's gigabyte hard drives, but when you worked off a 56kbps dialup modem at 5k/s download, and using 1.4MB floppies, those were huge to carry around. Today, a MP3 takes roughly 1MB per minute of music with relatively high quality compared to what we had back then.

Thus fan created sounds attempted to recreate the music as close as possible without blowing the filesize out of practical range. The first was MIDI, the second was Tracking, otherwise known as Modulating. The programs were numerous, from FastTracker to ModTracker, with equally numerous file extensions, many programs worked to reproduce the sound system consoles used with varying features.

The basis of Modulating/Tracking is like this. You take a sound sample, let's say a guitar string. The tracker would create an instrument from it, and then you'd need to tell the program on what 'key' to play it, which would slightly modulate the sound sample faster or slower to simulate it. That sounds simple, but then you have to consider that a song is not a single instrument but many. In fact the SNES had 16 channels total that it could use.

A single channel can only play one sound sample at a time. It may change instrument, but not while 'holding' the note of another. Thus you were technically limited to 16 sounds played exactly at the same time. You had to give the program the right BPM to make the rhythm work, put the notes into sheets to recreate the melody.

Unlike Midi where you need to literally make the musical score in a single line, in Trackers they were divided in sheets. So if a certain part repeats itself often during a song, you could play the sheet instead of playing the same notes again. The tracker would technically read the sheets in the order it was told, which also allowed for loops to be created.

You probably noticed the problem with MP3s of repeating a single song over and over, there's a pause or some 'intro' to the song that you simply can't skip. In Modulating you could create a loop point and listen to it forever, just like you would in the game if you left it on.

Since it's fan created, the songs obviously are not 100% the same as the original or the MP3, ut it still allowed for much smaller files to be created to play this song at home. One particularly great Tracker was known as TSSF (The Super Street Fighter), which had an impressive collection of songs he modulated. There's one song that comes to mind as his most impressive feat.

Using simply what we could hear in leaked videos and demos, he managed to recreate down to perfection the FF7 Battle music. At least the beat of the song, as he used the closest instruments he could find. He put in the comments that he wasn't sure of the loop point either, but he still managed to nail it right on. And this was done months before the game was even released.

So here's to compare with your ears the differences between the sound of the 3 formats. I picked the 3 battle themes for Lufia II :Rise of the Sinistrals (Battle, Boss, Sinistral), one of my favorite games. The first is the original song in MP3, the second is in MIDI, and the last one is the MOD version. All can be played with recent versions of Winamp.

Battle : MP3 MIDI MOD
Boss : MP3 MIDI MOD
Sinistrals : MP3 MIDI MOD

You can get many MIDI and MODs (and a few remixed MP3s) for Lufia games on the excellent Forfeit Island website.

History Lessons #2 : Music

Ahhh, music. Personally, the one thing that sticks to mind the most about a game, beside the story for RPGs, is the music. Ever since I got access to the internet, one of my interests was finding music from my games. But there is an evolution behind it too, believe it or not.

Let's go back in time, in the 80s. If you checked my first history lesson, you already know about the Coleco. While I haven't done any tribunes for other systems, they did have common elements on that side.

The first generation of video game music was limited if any at all. Most of the games had a little jingle for the opening screen. For example, almost everyone remembers Pac-Man. Yet, does anyone remember that the game itself had no background music?

Wether it was because the evolution was not there yet, or simply because of technical limitations on those systems at the time, most games had little to no background music. Popeye and Burgertime for example did have a little 'bip boop' rhythm in the back. With nowaday's standars would be simply nothing else than a heart beat to check if the user is still paying attention to the game. Back then, it's all you had.

The only time you had actual music of any sort was during powerups. Pac-Man and Popeye had such power modes, accompanied by a little music that would die off when done. It would be the sole indication of such powered mode most of the time, outside of slight screen color changes.


The first generation of gaming systems also had one severe technical limitation to work around, which was the sound samples. In pretty much every case, they had samples pre-defined and hard-coded into the console itself. The cartdriges held no other data than what note to play on what rhythm.

This system also existed in the first computers. At first it was simply a single beep, but then it evolved into something similar to the consoles, being able to modulate the samples into something that becomes a melody. That system was called MIDI, which also was a standard for electronic organs/pianos. The MIDI system used samples that were on the computer/organ that played it.

When I started on the Internet nearly 10 years ago, there was something called XGMidi (I think), which was a MIDI player that contained it's own set of samples, rather than using the ones from the computer itself. The difference was surprising.

Nowadays most computers come with much better MIDI samples, and most sound cards have options to pick different qualities and sets of samples as well. But that also means that two computers won't run the same MIDI music exactly the same. Some MIDI songs actually sounded horrible on XGMidi, yet were perfect on normal MIDI, and sometimes they were better on XGMidi. It depends on the samples and their modulation. Sometimes it doesn't follow what the author inteded for it.

But up until the NES/MasterSystem, the principle was the same. And the impossibility of changing those samples made sure that everyone would hear the same music. There was only a handful of games that used exterior sound samples. Two examples I remember from the NES was Smash TV (Good luck! You'll need it!) and Star Wars (Luke! Use the Force!). The sound quality was horrendous and ear-splitting though, but that's the best you had.

I'll expand more next time, but before ending I'll leave you with two sound samples that you can download. For fault of having better examples, here's the battle music from Final Fantasy (the first).

First the MP3 format so you hear how it was out of your TV. Then two samples of the same song in MIDI. Since MIDIs are usually done by fans, it won't exactly sound the same, but you can note the difference in the instruments used. Out of the two samples, depending on your computer, one will probably sound better than the other.

FF1-Battle MP3
FF1-Battle MIDI 01
FF1-Battle MIDI 02

PS : I prefer the first MIDI to the second ;)