MinerVGA DOS Game Soundtrack (AdLib HSC Tracker Music)

[Kage999]

man I fucking loved this as a kid.........I always used to hit traps on purpose to see how much % health it do.

[alexriesenbeck]

@Kage999 thanks for the comment! classic games man are the best

[MDConker]

One more thing. I checked all the files for the game for MIDI headers in Notepad and I could not find any.

[alexriesenbeck]

@MDConker Thanks for looking into this! I guarantee this song played with this game. I did the same, with the MIDI header search, came up empty-handed. The music would come on as soon as the title screen was displayed. There were no SFX from the speakers or PC speaker. The music would abruptly cut off when you died or exited the game. I'm an old QB programmer as well, QB apps are capable of playing MIDI music with the right routines.

[alexriesenbeck]

@MDConker I was learning to play this on my portable keyboard for my 5th grade class' version of 'show and tell'. I even wrote 'MinerVGA Song' on the cassette label. Very few of the other games on the CD had any sort of music, this was one of them.

[alexriesenbeck]

@MDConker Doing more research, I tracked down the shareware CD it originated from. It was a disc from November of 1997 titled "Multi-Media CD: Exploring the Boundaries of Sound & Vision". Looks like the folks who compiled the CD added a memory-resident AdLib tracker to play some music in the background. The music that plays is a tracker file called "WVOLDTIT.HSC". It seems it was a demo song included with the HSC AdLib Composer / HSC-Tracker.

[alexriesenbeck]

@MDConker Check out the version I played here: cd . textfiles . com/mmcd/GAMES/MINER/

Thanks again for checking this out!

[MDConker]

@alexriesenbeck Ah good. You found it. Now you're going to try to convert HSC to a format you can work with?

[alexriesenbeck]

@MDConker I think I'll leave it as-is :) but thanks for your insight!

[MDConker]

Also... the music sounds sort of like MIDI but it has leanings more toward CMF (Creative Music Format). Some people mistake CMF music for straight MIDI because they use the same encoding format. Games such as Wolfenstein 3D, Bio Menace, and other games by Apogee Software always used CMF.

[MDConker]

Al, I don't think this is the right game. MinerVGA was written in MS Quick Basic 4.0. As far as I know it's only capable of controlling the internal speaker... not MIDI. Furthermore I cannot find any sound config controls in the game. Most DOS games required you to know your sound card's IRQ and DMA channels in order to work. What other game could it be?

[makeshiftbattlefield]

aaaahhh....to be a miner and die with your tool in your hand! What a life!