First post, by SpeedySPCFan
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Hi all,
A few days, I was playing with my SC-55 and making some weird sounds on it by messing with the parameters and got to thinking: what if it were possible to add SC-55 support into the original Dune? I know from a musical and technical standpoint it's possible - the SC-55 has more than enough sounds for it and with some clever manipulation it's possible to capture the weird electronic/ethnic aesthetic of the AdLib Gold soundtrack... the only problem is actually getting it in the game.
I know there was a thread here a while back about hacking the AdLib portion of the HERAD sound engine, and the MT-32 MIDI versions of the tracks were briefly mentioned but that didn't go anywhere. I tried to dig some stuff up myself but unfortunately I made no progress - the only program that I know of that can easily read the .M32 HERAD files is MIDIPLEX, which seemingly can't save the files correctly. I don't know if I'm doing something wrong, but my attempts at trying to change anything in the M32 files in it and saving them resulted in files that crashed my game. Perhaps it's because the files might be uncompressed after messing with them, but I can't find any file compressor for Dune even though one supposedly existed a while back.
Did anyone ever figure out how to insert custom MIDI music into Dune? Did I miss some really obvious post here or elsewhere on the internet with some secret formula to getting this all to work, or is this just a fruitless endeavor? I'd like to see another game with a soundtrack that properly takes advantage of what the SC-55 offers, but I'm not much of the programmer type, just a musician. Any help or leads on this is appreciated!
EDIT: Well... I fooled around a bit with an SC-55 version of the soundtrack. Here's Free Men/BAGDAD.M32 - the drums use an increased pitch bend range, and since I don't think SysEx is supported by HERAD I'd have to bundle a program to run a MIDI with SysEx in it before the game starts. That could work. Everything else is standard CCs and stuff though. https://soundcloud.com/speedyongaku/dune92-bagdad-sc55
Musician & music gear/game reviewer.
MIDI hardware: JD-990, SC-55, SC-880, SD-90, VL70-m, Motif ES, Trinity, TS-10, Proteus 2000, XK-6, E6400U