When I was a youngster in the late 1980s, I formed an Amiga game dev team with 2 friends.
Before making games, we started by trying to sell game music that used minimal RAM, made with our music editor SIDmon.
To promote our game music, this energetic music module was composed by our musician Ramon Braumuller. The file, including tiny sampled sounds, is only 22 kilobytes.
@Wraithe 👍 Yes, the songs were mod(ule)s. Often, mods were made using one of the Soundtracker / Protracker editors, but this mod was made using our own SIDmon music editor.
@racchio Yeah, we had plans for an army type game back in those days, but decided to go for a shoot-'em-up called Venom Wing, which got this soundtrack by Ramon:
In the late 1980s our small game dev team developed 2 Amiga music editors: SIDmon and Digital Mugician, both featuring synth sounds and sampled sounds.
Mugician was published by the British Thalamus game publisher in 1990, and was used for several Amiga games, including our own.
This is our composer Ramon Braumuller's 4-channel Mugician intro.
@metin
I have been looking into Mugician previously and now that I have an Amiga again, I would love to try it out! I am new to trackers though and would really like some introduction, preferably one that is not a video 😹
Is there a manual available anywhere by chance? I have a weak spot for those, especially from late 80ties/early 90ties 😸
The disks are easily enough to find (and I believe you provided them yourselves on the Internet Archive) but documentation not so much, unfortunately.
@hanno Thanks for your interest in Mugician. Good point about the manual. I've got an original box with the printed manual I wrote for Mugician, but will check if I can find it online first. I'll be back. 🙂
Continuing a thread about our Amiga music and editors (see previous posts), here are some screenshots from our Digital Mugician, published in 1990 by the British Thalamus game publisher.
Motivated by a request from @hanno, today I scanned the manual I wrote for Mugician.
The program, manual, info, music (as MP3 and mods) and more can be downloaded for free here:
Installed the BZR Player on Windows, capable of playing over 650 audio file formats, such as lots of Amiga module formats, including our Digital Mugician music editor files.
The BZR Player has a WAV output option, which enabled me to convert the 7-channel intro tune for a demo of our game Hoi (1992), composed by Ramon Braumuller.
@dinosaurgerms Yes, all of our game and demo music was composed by Ramon Braumuller, using our own music editors. I've always been an admirer of his music. He lives around the corner of my home, and we still go out for a drink every now and then.
The BZR Player (see previous post in this thread) allowed me to resurrect an Amiga music module I hadn't been able to convert to MP3 yet.
It's a song by Ramon Braumuller for a hidden sub-game in level 3 of our game Hoi (1992). The game was a shoot 'em up that increased in speed, so the tune reflects the hectic gameplay. 🙂
@metin the Amiga as well as the C64 had some wicked cool sound chips. Even if I really like NES, SNES and Genesis/MegaDrive chiptunes. The Amiga and the C64 had a ballance between smooth and crispy punch none of the others could really match.
I think the first time after the Amiga i was really suprised by how awesome music in a few kb could sound was in Unreal and Unreal Tournament.
For me Turrican II started it and unreal Tournament pretty much ended an era. Kind of since it's a different tech
@SpookyDoom 👍 Chris Hülsbeck's Turrican 2 title music inspired our coder to boost our Digital Mugician music editor with a total of 7 channels (which sounded crispier than the OctaMed method of splitting each of the 4 channels).
In 1990 our Amiga shoot-'em-up game Venom Wing was released by the British Thalamus game publisher.
I asked our musician Ramon Braumuller to create a fitting title tune, reflecting the adventures of a space fighter pilot. As Ramon is a very skilled drummer, I also asked him to process a drum solo into the 4-channel tune. The size of the tune, including all sound samples, is 168 kilobytes.
In 1990 our Amiga music editor Digital Mugician was released by the British game publisher Thalamus.
Our music composer Ramon Braumuller made some demo tracks, including this one. Wait for the part with the sampled guitar riffs, which were live-played by the guitarist of his former band, Michel van Polen.
The music module, including sampled sounds, is 185 kilobytes. It loops, hence the abrupt ending.
Check the #TeamHoi hashtag for more tunes and info.
@metin What a great song! I like the laid-back feel and the funky base.
The moment the guitar kicks in reminds me of the beginning of Search and Destroy [1]. Not so much the notes themselves, but the energy behind it. The guitar solo has a nice bluesy feel to it, which is a good contrast to the happy feeling at the beginning of the song 🙂
@fabianfucci Thanks! It was spread as a SIDmon music demo disk in the late 1980s, but I guess it only reached a limited amount of people in those pre-internet years.
@ohyran Yes, I've always been a big admirer of Ramon's musical talent, ever since I heard a track he had made on the Amiga when we still were 16 year-old gamer pals. I immediately asked him to join our dev-team-to-be. We worked together for 10 years, and are still friends.
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