[ajxs]

I originally wanted to reply to this comment saying _"The age of MIDI music in games wasn't that short, was it?"_. I thought I'd look it up first, and you're right. It looks like by around 1994 most computer games were using PCM music. It looks like the Sega Mega Drive with its FM chip was released in 1988. The first Sound Blaster card with an integral FM synth was released in 1989. General MIDI was only standardised in 1991. So I guess it didn't last as long as I thought.

Still, I grew up in the 90s, and this kind of MIDI music in games was ubiquitous, and instantly recognisable to anyone in my generation. Even though it didn't last long. It had a huge impact.

[montag]

You might appreciate this: https://mmontag.github.io/chip-player-js/browse

[pantulis]

This is unbelieveably cool! The MIDI collection looks a lot like my own personal MIDI collection that I downloaded 25 years ago from FTP sites!

[ajxs]

Very cool! The interface is great, nice work!

[klodolph]

So, depends on how you count the “age of MIDI”. Majority of Nintendo 64 games used a MIDI pipeline… you’d take MIDI and a sound bank, convert it to some proprietary format, and drop it into your game. By “PCM” I just mean sampled instruments. That includes stuff like SoundBlaster and Roland SoundCanvas.

FM was only a short slice of MIDI music in games. A lot of that was Genesis / Mega Drive.