If you’re a fan of the early ’90s authentic video game sounds and music, you’ll probably enjoy this video and project from SoundFontGuy (SFG). He’s recorded a full album of retro game inspired music using Sony’s PS1 as source and inspiration.
Ideologies: An Erbalta Tale is an album of 24 tracks composed for and recorded from a real PlayStation console’s sound chip.
The PlayStation uses sequenced music data with similarities to MIDI (it’s essentially a stripped down version) plus sample banks which have links to Sound Fonts. Samples are always 4-bit ADPCM compressed.
SFG used open source software to look at existing music data and then set about creating his own music.
He also used music hardware and samples which would’ve been around at the time, including the Roland SoundCanvas, JV-1080, Emu Proteus/2 and some others.
The video goes into much more detail about the process. It’s very cool – and dedicated.
