How and Why

First of all, you should make sure that you have a nice program to listen to these files. Even though the Windows Media Player is quite willing to do so, one shouldn't really have to use it, especially if you intend to listen to more than one file. Or if you want to have them as background music for Windows, then I can tell you: search no more, because there is one program that does it all (except making coffee . . . ): MidiPlus by Haris I. Volos. This program is Freeware, so you will get your money's worth, and much more than that.

To make these actually worth to listen to, you'll probably need a Wavetable sound card. Most of them are optimized for General Midi and should sound good on any GM compatible sound card. My sound card is a Sound Blaster 16 (the original!) with a Yamaha DB-50XG daughterboard that provides the wavetable sound. I have found this combination to work great for both old and new games. The only problem occurs when I try to play midi files that are optimized for the Sound Blaster AWE32/64. From those I usually don't even hear so much as a beep, because they switch the bank number, which apparently confuses my Yamaha card.

Oh, and by the way: if you have any files that you think I should offer on this site, don't hesitate to tell me. But please ask first before sending them attached or encoded, because my site administrator tends to get mad at these huge mails.

Some people have been asking me why I still use midi files, when there are music formats that are way cooler, like MP3 for example. The reason is simple: size. My current collection contains about 1000 songs, and uses up little more than 10 MB of disk space. Try that with MP3! You'd probably have to buy a few hard disks extra...


This page has been viewed(Computer Games Midi Counter) times since Oct 20/1998. (Counter provided courtesy of WebCounter).

This page and all graphics on it copyright © 1999 by Josef Drexler.

The copyrights for the individual songs lie with their authors. No copyright infringements intended. If you think a file should not be available here for copyright or any other reasons, please tell me. All trademarks are owned by the respective companies.
 

Last changed on Feb 25 2001 19:03 EST by Josef Drexler