Bobby Prince's Old WebTV Site (Some Pre-MUS DOOM MIDIs and More)

[TheUltimateDoomer666]

Wayback Machine links:

• Songs: https://web.archive.org/web/19991111211422/http://bpmusic.com/webtv/web_songs.html
• Little Known Facts: https://web.archive.org/web/19991111214507/http://bpmusic.com/webtv/web_little.html

 

Zip file containing all MIDIs:

• https://www.dropbox.com/s/czm9ft134yebc8n/bobby prince Music WebTV.zip?dl=0

 

Edit: Some of the Commander Keen song titles shown in the Wayback Machine's archive are outdated. The full titles from Bobby Prince can be viewed on VGMPF's Commander Keen pages.

 

I was looking at the WebTV section of Bobby Prince's old website and found some interesting trivia about some of his works. For example, Bobby explains what the title of "Going in Circles" from Bio Menace means, and he also says there are cases where FM synthesis actually sounds better and is more flexible than General MIDI music (and vice versa). He also remarks that writing "dirty metal" with the General MIDI standard just doesn't sound good.

 

While many (but not all) of the Apogee MIDIs seem to have been archived on VGMPF, and although Bobby's DOOM comments can already be read here, I was surprised to find pre-MUS conversions of a few DOOM MIDIs like E1M1, as I had never seen them before. The DOOM songs being in MIDI rather than MUS format means that the songs' original timing and BPM is preserved, so they will display properly in sequencers.

 

There's also an orchestral song called "Opening to a Mystery" (previously unpublished - opening.mid) that is based on "Into's Sandy City".

 

The Facts page contains some short sound clips in Au format recorded at the id and Cygnus Studios offices.

 

I apologize if these MIDIs were already known about or if all of them are already available elsewhere, but for convenience I compiled all the MIDIs and Aus into a zip file (see third link at top of post). I added a game title prefix to all the MIDI filenames to make them easier to identify. I have not edited any of the files themselves in any way whatsoever.

 

 

Edited July 10, 2021 by TheUltimateDoomer666
Post formatting and filename prefix consistency.

[Gez]

Pretty awesome!

 

I think that back in time, one could have tried to check if there was a bossit02.au on the site to go along the 01, 03, and 04... But without any link to it, it couldn't have been grabbed by the Internet archive.

[Biodegradable]

An excellent find, dude!

[TheUltimateDoomer666]

The E1M1 and E3M3 MIDIs use the Roland Power Drum Kit while the in-game MUS versions only use standard drums. Also, the MUS files' melodic channel use starts from 1, while the MIDIs' melodic channel use instead starts from 2 (channel 1 is reserved). This is presumably a leftover from when Bobby was writing music for games that had the option of using AdLib sound effects (e.g., Wolfenstein 3D). Basically, the music's first channel would need to be empty to stop the music from interfering with the sounds.

Edited July 9, 2021 by TheUltimateDoomer666

[deus-ex]

What a great find! Thanks for sharing. :)

[Wavy]

Oh wow. This is a good find!

[Doomkid]

I remember hearing that Power Drums version of E1M1 when perusing random MIDI sites! I assumed some dork had gone in and edited themselves.. Eating my words as we speak.

 

Other than the handful featured here, the only other "pre-MUS" Doom MIDIs I'm aware of are the ones that come with Doom95 (doom_sinister_demonsdead.zip) It would be awesome to get non-MUS-mangled versions of all the tracks some time, but I'm not sure they all even exist anymore.

 

Interesting to note, on tracks like D_SHAWN, the MIDI has all the volume channels set to 127, however they were all lowered to 100 for the MUS version that shipped with the game. I'm guessing this was done manually, not by ddt's conversion tool.

 

EDIT: Wow, there's lots of small differences.. The drum pitch-shifting for DDTBLU also seems to be a little different when comparing them side-by-side in Sekaiju.

Edited July 9, 2021 by Doomkid