First post, by revolstar
- Rank
- Newbie
If you're anything like me and Lords of the Realm 2 is one of your all time favorite games, then it must've bothered you that the game's epic EPIC music is so dreadfully lo-fi. Well, I've found a fix for that!
A while back, Keith Zizza, the audio designer for numerous Sierra games (Lords 2 included), uploaded the entire soundtrack to youtube in CD audio quality ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvLYEv8V0fM ). In his own words:
In the spring & summer of 1996, I wrote the soundtrack to Lords of the Realm II. It was the second game I worked on with Sierra […]
In the spring & summer of 1996, I wrote the soundtrack to Lords of the Realm II. It was the second game I worked on with Sierra (the first was Rise & Rule of Ancient Empires). The challenge was to make five map ("scroll") tunes that intensified as your empire grew. Also, there were four battle tunes, a setup, and a credits tune created.
Originally the music was going to be released on the CD-ROM as 16-bit 44100 stereo WAV files, but there wasn't enough room on the CD to accomodate them. Because they wouldn't stream off the CD, they had to be loaded in memory and so were released as 8-bit 11025 Hz files!
One big file on the original CD-ROM, "Pumkin.wav" was a composite of several tunes, but only used as 'filler' to max out the data on the disc; it was never meant to be played (as mentioned earlier, the tunes wouldn't all fit on the CD).
So here they are, the full fidelity tunes from over two decades ago. Put on your plate mail and get digging!
I figured out that all we need to enjoy that sweet hi-res music in-game is to simply rip the above tracks from youtube, rename them appropriately and put them in the directory where the game keeps its .wav files (this varies between versions).
If you don't want to go through all that hassle, here's a link to the said audio files that I've uploaded to my google drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1NPKCA … P0Y?usp=sharing
These are already renamed, all you need to do is download them and place them in the correct directory. Enjoy!
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