I've had zero luck trying to find out how people made the soundtrack for old games that were made before chip music software existed. For example, how was the soundtrack to Pokemon red and blue made? There's probably an obvious answer, so please school me.
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Ottawa, ON
"How NES Music Was REALLY Composed"
http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=7390
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Holland
I know Chris Hülsbeck wrote his own sort of tracker before the word 'tracker' even existed in that context. He used it to make music back in the days. Ofcourse mostly still programming sounds but as a tracker predecessor he did a pretty good job.
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Sweden
For Pokémon I'd guess some sort of in-house MML flavour. Writing a music compiler isn't rocket science!
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Madriz, Supain
I remember reading about the software koji kondo (spelling?) used to transport his songs into modules, but sadly I cant remember where
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Joliette, QC, Canada
I know Tommy Tallarico got an NES cart and stuffs...
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Abandoned on Fire
I don't believe game developers used "chip music software" even after it was available... DutyCycleGenerator is an excellent read, regardless!
EDIT: Meaning trackers or anything we would recognize today.
Last edited by egr (Jan 21, 2013 1:48 am)
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nɐ˙ɯoɔ˙ʎǝupʎs
I recall that Jim Cuomo (Defender Of The Crown OST among many, many others) used straight code for a lot of his soundtracks.
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matt's mind
there are development packages/hardware (official and officially-licensed) released for a lot of these consoles (if not all the relevant ones, if you follow rumors on some). depending on the console and how music on that platform actually works, the end-user of the devkit would have different options.
these devkits often have a GUI element, i suppose that would be their 'chipmusic software' in a way... or whatever the mechanical means of 'composing' or adding music you have...
'intelligent devices', for example, was a company which made a lot of the development hardware for nintendo consoles, and was licensed by Nintendo to do so. i *think* Dolphin might have been the name of the company that did a popular gamecube one, but maybe thats the devices model name... i dunno, been a while i thought about that stuff.
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Melbourne, Australia
10k wrote:
I recall that Jim Cuomo (Defender Of The Crown OST among many, many others) used straight code for a lot of his soundtracks.
Oh man, that game had some great music. So much more impressive knowing that.
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Brunswick, GA USA
kitsch wrote:
i *think* Dolphin might have been the name of the company that did a popular gamecube one, but maybe thats the devices model name... i dunno, been a while i thought about that stuff.
Dolphin was the code name of the GameCube project before it had a real name, as Wii was Revolution, Sega Dreamcast was Duval, etc.
All that is quite correct, though. I remember a photo showing midi gear used to create the SMB 3 music, it was ported in with a development tool. I expect the classic Pokemon soundtracks to have been done like that, considering the GB platform was already ten years old by then 
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matt's mind
chunter wrote:
Dolphin was the code name of the GameCube project before it had a real name, as Wii was Revolution, Sega Dreamcast was Duval, etc.
ah, that explains it then. the gamecube devices are a bit big, just remembered them saying dolphin on them.
thanks for the new info!