MUSIC

Being a musician first, this is the easy part for me.

I learned how to write music on the Amiga so having the chance to go back and use Protracker again is really great.

The current plan is to use Protracker with 4 channels of music. 1 channel will be of low priority and will be overwritten by SFX dynamically during gameplay.

Music is generally made up of 4 parts: Drums, Bass, Rhythm and Melody.

So in this case it will always be the rhythm that loses out as I deem it the least important. We will have to trial this once we get the code up and running as it may just not work.

An alternative option will be to see if we can use the TFMX music system (used in games like Turrican). As this will give us upto 7 channels of music (I think) and I believe this gets mixed in software down to 1 output channel, leaving 3 channels for SFX.

The approach to the arrangements is to make it sound typically Amiga. In that we are not trying to emulate the FM sound of the original arcade. What’s the point? The Amiga has a hardware sampler built into it! So we can use some classic sounds from the ST-01 sample disk aswell as some sourced from Double Dragon II and Final Fight (both of which had superb title tracks and some kickass samples).

I am mocking up the tracks in Ableton using the Amiga samples and sticking to 4 channels. I then export the midi files and then convert them into Protracker format. There is some additional work to refine the output by adding all the pitch bends, vibrato, portamento slides and decays back in. The result is sounding pretty good!

My frequent collaborator Cody Carpenter has provided some stunning solos to extend the arrangements.

You can check out one of our Protracker versions below!