How was the music made for those classic Dos games?

[Honeyweat]

I'm really interested in how the music for early MSDos games like (Jill of the Jungle, Commander Keen ect..) was made.

The music sounds polyphonic and computerized.

I'm looking for the early software that game designers used for composing those kinds of sounds so I can create my own.

Any direction or knowledge would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[dosraider]

I think that the best place to ask such questions is Vogons, there you'll find some real specialist in those matters.
http://vogons.zetafleet.com/index.php

[aderack]

You're talking about sound formats that use the Sound Blaster's Yamaha FM chip. There are several of these, the most notorious of which may be Creative's own proprietary .CMF format. Dan Froelich, who wrote the music to many of Epic Megagames' early projects (Jill, Brix, Solar Winds) used AdLib Visual Composer to create AdLib .ROL files, then a command line utility to convert those to .CMF.

Though old and a little creaky, Visual Composer is surprisingly powerful. The general interface is similar to the fabled Deluxe Paint. It uses modern keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, and Shift-click. The main stumbling point is in switching instrument patches; it's easy when you know how, but the method isn't very obvious! It could also use a proper undo feature and a few other niceties. Still, it's more than functional.

[tienkhoanguyen]

Cheezits and Rice!hehe

In my games, I program in Borland Turbo C 2.01 and Borland Turbo Assembler 4.1; If you look at one of my piano sound maker, it shows how sound is activated and its frequencies.

In fact, Borland Turbo C 2.01 only has 1 sound command that encompasses everything.

sound( the-frequency-you-want-here );

This activates the sound. The frequency number goes inside the parentheses.

no sound();

The above turns off sound completely.

However this uses the PC-speaker. I have seen it has the potential to do computerize music.