I’m still a big fan of the good old Commodore Amiga. I still have my Amiga 1200 and work a lot with it and also still play a lot games.
From time to time i will port more game music to Renoise and add the music here.
The first one is a remake of the Turrican 2 ending theme made with Renoise.
Some years ago i had the idea to convert some of the original Turrican 2 songs to Renoise by re-composing them.
I used all the original samples from the original.
The samples where extracted from the TFMX Editor, a Tracker software for the Commodore Amiga that can go way beyond the limits of the Amiga chipset. That made it possible to extend the 4 channels of the Amiga’s sound hardware to up to 7 channels (also known as the "7-Voice Routine, developed by Chris Hülsbeck and Jochen Hippel).
The TFMX Editor was programmed and used by Chris Hülsbeck, the creator of the original music.
This program was used for all Turrican 1 & 2 music and for much more other game music made by Chris Hülsbeck.
It was a hard work of two weeks. The TFMX Editor is a heavy to understand program, even for me, a 90’s tracker nerd.
It was a very hard work to recreate it as good as possible with Renoise. Lots of effect commands experimenting, trial & error, finding out the exact notes and their lengths, etc., because a lot of functions used in TFMX can’t be recreated the same way in Renoise and i had to find another way to realize them with just the internal options of Renoise.
Especially that Arp sound which starts from the beginning of the track. It has a special “from previous note to actual note” effect, which can’t be realised the same way in Renoise and i had to re-sample it with the effect already on the notes (the reason why i used the phrase editor in Renoise for it). But i think it comes very close to the original.
Original music by Chris Hülsbeck. [http://www.huelsbeck.com]
Remake by Mastrcode (with friendly permission of Chris Hülsbeck. Thanks Chris!)
There’re some trackers that can play TFMX song files and some rippers that can extract the original TFMX song files from the game disks, but they’re only for the Amiga. And these rippers extract the TFMX files from the game disks, but they’re still in TFMX format. Until today there’s no solution for PC/Mac. Ther’re only some players for PC that can play these files, but can’t extract them to get the samples/songs.
One only can extract the samples on the Amiga. These samples then can be used in Renoise via the raw audio import feature of Renoise (see preferences > Files). But you still have to re-compose the song from scratch.
For the both others i must have a look if i still have the disks. I do it with a real Amiga. The emulators for PC don’t really work well with the Amiga softwares i use for that purpose. After i extracted all the song files and samples, then i can port it to PC and load the things in WinUAE. My real Amiga 1200 works way better with the ripper software i use.
Especially with the TFMX Editor and it’s song file system in the games where it is implemented for playing the game music. It works way easier with games that use Protracker file system for the music for example. There i just have to rip off the mod files because they directly can be loaded with Renoise.
Yeah the lead sounds different than on the video, that’s right.
This is because on the Video is recorded from the Amiga’s audio output or from an emulator as you would record a song from a CD while playing it in your CD drive or CD player.
If it’s recorded with an emulator, the sound is also different.
Emulators are emulating the chipset of the Amiga not accurately enough because of the digital interpolations. An emulator always sounds a bit different. Because the circuit of the chipset is emulated software based.
When the sound directly comes from the original hardware circuit both will sound different because of the “digitalization” on the software side.
My Renoise version uses the original unprocessed raw samples and i switched the sample interpolations all to off in all the Renoise instruments to get the raw sound without that filtering effect of the digital interpolation. The samples are not recorded, they’re directly extracted 1:1 like you extract files from a zip file for example. Mod files and other tracker file formats, even the Renoise xrns file format are only containers like such a zip file. So you still have the original samples as they were recorded from the original creator.
Other remakes i heard also sound all different. Because the creators resampled the sounds in a different way with different tools, chipsets etc. and don’t even think about disabling sample interpolation. The interpolated sounds all sound a bit LP filtered in the high frequency range to prevent artifacts.
On Amigas the sounds often were sampled with different pitches.
Because they were sampled on different notes for different purposes. If a sample was sampled let’s say on C4, it would sound way different to the same sample that was sampled on C3.
For example, if one samples a sound on A4 the fundamental note of the sample has a frequency of 440 Hz, and then samples the same sound again on A5 the fundamental note of that sample has a frequency of 880 Hz.
And if you then play both samples on A3, they both play in a different “sample rate”.
That means the A4 sample plays then at the frequeny of 220 Hz while the A5 sample plays at 440 Hz, even if both play the same note. So one can have the same sound, but both sound still diffent.
Also the samplerate can make a difference. One samples a sound at 28 kHz while another creator samples at 32 kHz. Just have a look into the ST sample disks. All the samples have differences in sample rates. One sample has a rate of 32 kHz, the next sample a rate of 28 kHz, some even only 8 kHz, etc. That all makes the difference how a sample sounds at the end on the Amiga.
It’s like with the graphic on the Amiga. For example on an Amiga 1200 with AGA chipset (Advanced Graphics Architecture) a game has better looking graphics than the same game on an Amiga 500 with OCS chipset (Original Chip Set).
This time it was very easy. I was able to find and extract the original mod files in the memory dump of the loaded game. Just loaded into Renoise and re-corrected the pannings of the 4 tracks like its on the real machine and saved them as xrns files.
Yes, that’s why I would never use samples for melodious stuff nowadays, VSTs only.
Thanks. But no need to make an effort for me, I already got all the original Amiga sound files and in case of MODs they’re playable in Renoise anyway, even though there might be some “glitches” due to compatibility reasons. In case you’re looking for a specific Amiga sound file, I may have it. No matter if games music, cracktro music or other scene stuff just like my favorite AHX compositions like this. And about 20 years ago I’ve also converted all of my favorites to MP3, so in case you would like them to be ready for being played anywhere…
If you’re using a real Amiga, you could also use this to rip the sounds:
That’s what I used back then. And I still got one. What about you?
Great work! I remember ripping music from various Amiga games in my time so I could listen to it in a player, but there’s probably no way I’ll remember what I used. It wasn’t hardware though. I think the process included searching memory dumps for various mod and aiff sample headers
No problem. It makes fun doing such things like in the good old days and i feel like i 'm the young boy again from back in the days who wanted to be an Amiga hacker..
Noticed no glitches with XJ220. Had some troubles with the second mod file of Pinball Dreams where the bpm tempo command ZTxx went a bit crazy in Renoise. Every time i load the mod file in Renoise it loads with a different tempo than before. I reported that glitch in the Help, Support & Bugs forum and dblue confirmed that this is a bug after i sent him the mod file.
So it also has its good sides that i had this idea, because we detected another bug we might never had found otherwise.
The good old Action Replay.
I also had it, but it died some years ago. But i don’t really need it.
I use specialized software on the Amiga for this Purpose.
The tools i use on the Amiga are Exotic Ripper, RIPIT, Jack The Ripper, and Pro-Wizard. I mostly use Pro-Wizard because it does the best job.
Oh those were the golden days… by the way the spirit of Commodore is alive and kicking with new owners, it will be interesting to see where they take it, maybe they’ll finally make a fun and nice Linux distro
@Garf
They bought Commodore? Ok, let’s hope that fans can revive Commodore the way we want it to be.
There are many others that do have glitches. Especially those with some “crazy” pattern effects. And as you already noticed, the originals often sound different when it comes to details. The original files do even sound different when not playing through the original hardware.
Yes, and after 13 years I’m finally creating another Amiga remix. One of my favorite cracktunes “needs” to be remixed. That’s something I wanted to do for years now. I guess I just needed some inspiration from someone else, so thanks for that.
I’m following it since this project started. Hopefully it turns to a huge success and Commodore will be the big competitor again like in Commodore’s golden days.
.
