VOGONS


First post, by Tijn

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Hello,

I just released the soundtrack to a shareware game for MS-DOS called Slip Speed, which was submitted earlier this year for the DOS Games Jam. It's a top-down racing game, a bit like Micro Machines meets Wipeout. More info about the game here: https://voxel.itch.io/slipspeed

Since the game runs in MS-DOS, we thought it would be cool to try to make the game fit onto a floppy disk. Because the game itself is about 900 KB, that leaves about half a megabyte for all the music if it should fit on a standard 1.44 MB 3.5" diskette.

Obviously with just 500 KB of space for all the music, a format like MP3 was out of the question, because that could only fit like 30 seconds. But since the game is targeted at MS-DOS PCs, there's of course the OPL chip that's found on popular cards such as the SoundBlaster which can play music just fine. Music written for OPL takes up almost no space at all, because the files just contain instructions that are sent to the chip.

So we looked at some options and it turns out that in 2018 the folks at Reality released a massive update to RAD Tracker, their Adlib tracker program originally released in 1995. Back then it only supported the OPL2 chip (which is found on the original Adlib card) but in this 2018 v2 update they included support for the OPL3 chip (such as found on the SoundBlaster 16). This means support for stereo, among some other things, which is cool.

So I decided to dive into RAD Tracker and actually found it pretty workable. I watched this tutorial video by Louis Gorenfeld, which helped me on my way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3dK3ZJ2DQI (it's for RAD Tracker v1, but it's largely the same)

The game has 16 different circuits to race on, and together with a theme song for the menus and stuff, the soundtrack contains 18 music tracks, coming to a total running time of over 40 minutes. This seemed like a pretty significant chunk of music, so I decided to release it on its own.

The album not only comes with the audio files (in MP3 and FLAC) but also includes a little jukebox app which actually runs inside MS-DOS. It uses the original .RAD files I made using RAD Tracker v2, the same files that are also used in the game to play the music. You can load these files into RAD Tracker yourself and mess around, change the tempo, fiddle with the instruments, whatever.

Pretty cool right! The whole thing is 5 bucks, but on itch.io there's actually a free demo which includes the first 5 tracks (including the jukebox app).

I'd love to hear what you think!

You can find it on itch.io: https://tijn.itch.io/slipspeed-ost
Or on Bandcamp: https://martijnfrazer.bandcamp.com/album/slip … inal-soundtrack