The music of Blood & Magic, as played by the game running in DOSBox connected to a Roland Sound Canvas SC-55mkII via a USB MIDI interface.
Roland's Sound Canvas units are MIDI romplers (which produce musical notes by playing built-in, prerecorded digital sound samples). They were some of the first General MIDI-compliant devices. GM, published in 1991, mandated a standard list of instruments, which simplified composition of music for computer games at a time when there was a proliferation of MIDI hardware devices from different manufacturers.
This is in contrast to the earlier use by many computer games of non-General MIDI-compliant devices like the Roland MT-32, which had its own proprietary set of instrument sounds. (Of course, unlike the MT-32, the Sound Canvas is not really a synthesizer, forcing composers to use the built-in timbres rather than create new sounds.)
The Roland Sound Canvas was a kind of standard of computer music during its heyday. Some composers of early/mid-90s computer games scored their games with the Roland Sound Canvas in mind. One set of FM voice patches, designed by Team Fat and used by many games to play music on AdLib and Sound Blaster cards, was designed to have the card's FM OPL chip mimic the sound of each instrument as played by a Roland Sound Canvas.
Blood & Magic uses the Human Machine Interfaces MIDI framework to play music. The tracks are stored in HMP format within the MAIN.STF file. Each stored file is referenced by a resource number, which I've included in the title of each video.
The game is composed of 15 levels which are arranged in 5 "stories" of 3 levels each, and there's a musical track for each of the 15 levels. Each story also has 4 short tracks for its cutscenes.
This playlist:
• Blood & Magic - Sound ...
from Blood & Magic (1996)
Lead Music Composer: Ron Saltmarsh
Music Composer: Andy Warr
Game Developer: Tachyon Studios
Game Publisher: Interplay Productions
24 сен 2024
