Dear stereo2go forum managers and members, My name is Herminio. I'm half spanish and ecuadorian, and I grew up in Vienna, Austria. In the early 90's when I was 15 or so my dad bought me a WM-D3 as a reward for getting good grades in school. I know, it's total overkill for a 15-year old. But I was keen on getting that particular walkman because it had line in and rec input level which I wanted to record sound output from my TV and PC (mainly for recording video game music). Unfortunately my tape recordings are lost to the mists of time, but I managed to hold on to the D3, moving it from home to home about ten times. I have not been kind to it, often leaving it to spend hot summers in attics. I regret this a lot now. I am now trying to revive it, and this has led me to your forum. There is a lot of great info here but I have a few questions, too. Thank you for your patience and time.
Welcome to the forum! That's funny you were recording the music with it, I spent a lot of time in front of a TV in the late 70's doing the same thing.
We used to record TV shows and movies but also music off the radio. It was hard to get one song without buying a full album or tape and that was too much money for a kid.
I was recording video game music in 1993, Mega Man X for Super Nintendo. That blazing rock soundtrack is one of my all time favourites. It is one of the key things that I put onto cassette today. Over and over again. Can't get enough of it lately! That and the Mega Man II and III Nintendo music. Not the original audio - fans who were / are musicians made high quality MIDI stereo versions. Authentic, exactly the same, just with superior instrument placing and so on. These are what I listen to since 2001 when I found them on vgmusic.com (on that site they are not sorted correctly, all jumbled up, a real mess, took a long time to sift out the right files...) My #1 music to put on cassette. Oh and of course the Castlevania IV for Super Nintendo music. But nothing else. Just those 4 games. Tip: For SNES music you get the original data files from the game, all free on "real" websites, then playback with the Japanese software "KB Media Player". (Can playback on other players too but this player is optimized for these files). Then you need a good old hardware Soundcard in an old PC to play the MIDI back on. I have an optical / coaxial digital output daughter card (e-bay) to get it off to a good external DAC and Amp... then to the cassette deck. Anyone who thinks MIDI is all bleeps and bloops has not heard the "real deal". (From a good Roland or Creative soundcard the result is mind blowing - in my opinion of course.)
@Hyperscope Lol, I actually also recorded Mega Man X from my SNES. Agree that it is a banging soundtrack. Castlevania IV had some great tracks too. I'm going to head over to vgmusic.com and look for those Mega Man tracks. Thanks for the tip
A lot of the really great MIDI versions of Mega Man II and III have been removed from vgmusic.com by their creators. Or for copyright reasons. I was lucky to find them around 2001 and saved them all. By good versions I mean completely indistinguishable from the original game music, but with superior instrument sounds and in stereo separation. Mega Man IV had some great music too and the fans made many "enhanced" versions that are quite superb in their own right. Like the Toad Man and Wave Man stage. Really classy stuff. As all the Mega Man music was... mostly piano and 50's rock N roll style (called Rock Man in Japan after all). Actraiser was another early Super Nintendo game (1990) that had a soundtrack CD performed live by orchestra. Search for it. These early games were serious works of art. (In my own strict opinion, games after 1995 degenerated to the point I lost interest completely. This was due to their general obsession with pushing 3D gaming but with horrible limited graphics. Gone were the lush landscapes of multilayered scrolling and great soundtracks etc,. The last Nintendo game I bought was Mega Man X. Then I got a PC and it was Doom, Doom II, Warcraft and Warcraft II then finally Starcraft. Pretty much the last game I played was Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament. Just became silly boring and repetitive by then.) These are what I had playing as background music for years when I was first online with, at first free dial up, then later pay dial up and ADSL in late 2001. And the PC game Doom II music by Bobby Prince. They released a soundtrack CD for Doom which is very rare and expensive. Luckily all the CD files are free online as .flac files on Archive.org. Music From Doom Vol. 1 by Bobby Prince. There are a few great instrumental rock tracks there.
Download the SPC audio files: For Mega Man X and Castlevania IV. They can be played back on various audio players with the correct plugin. Or get the KB Media player for arguably better results.
Hey, thanks for the KB Media player pointer. That's a great piece of software. I've been using Winamp + Chipamp plugin to play SPCs, but I really like KB Media's navigator. It just navigates inside rar, rsn, anything, it seems. And it's a portable app -- no installation wizard, which I really like. The creator Kobarin has poured their heart and soul into this gem of a program. Have used it to revisit Act Raiser (love the forest track), Mega Man X and Castlevania and a few other faves. Thanks again, @Hyperscope. As for vgmusic.com, it could do with some curation but I'm not compaining. It's nice that there are archives of this sort of thing out there, even if the best tracks have been removed. Maybe one of these days I'll listen through a bunch of those MIDIs and see if I can find any good ones that will play nicely on my gear. By the way I use a MIDI adapter on a Windows PC connected to a Roland SD-90 (like a SC-88) and then just use headhones or a regular stereo amp. Alternatively, the Falcosoft Midi player by Zoltan Bacsko is also very good in my opinion. It has soundfont support so MIDI files will render quite well. I first became interested in game music in the late 80s with my friend's NES and later SNES. That's when I realised how crappy the bleeps and bloops produced by my 286 PC's speaker were. Luckily I was able to save up over the years and get a Soundblaster and later even a Roland MT32. I would install and play games I'd already played to death years earlier, just to listen to the game music. Some game music composers really put everything they have into the game music, and there were a lot of such people in the 90s, I'd say. People like Barry Leitch. SNES games were harder to come by for me, but occasionally I'd borrow from a friend a musical gem like MegaMan X or R-Type. I wanted to capture that music on tape before I had to return the game cart. That's what made me want to get a recording walkman, and how I ended up on this forum, lol.
Yes. They worked so diligently and carefully with great dedication on the game music then. Hardware and memory limitations made them think smart. And there was prestige and competition among the corporations so create sublime works. I still use my old Creative Soundblaster Plus I bought in 2001 - but with added optical / coaxial out board. The daughter card is called: "Unisian Fiber Coaxial Digital Sound Card 24 Bit 192khz Spdif Daughter Card". The e-bay listing has all information needed. Youtube video is called "Sound Blaster Live! Optical Coax S/PDIF Mod" with the pins to use. But I wonder... what can I buy to get even better quality MIDI playback? Any suggestions? You can get the uncompressed Mega Man X sound pack where someone recreated the soundfont: https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts/1250 Additional ramblings: I only had a few games back then. Subscribed to the Nintendo magazine in late 1990 (I was 11) and the promotion at that time were all 4 of the big "players guides" books (Game Boy, NES, SNES and Super Mario World.) Complete screen shots for many games start to finish. So I studied these and the magazines to decide what game to get. Saving coins and rolling them in the coin tubes etc,. I was a harsh critic even then and very selective! Got a SNES August 1992 and rented Actraiser that Autumn from the video store and finished that within a week. Same for Castlevania IV a month or so later. And Prince of Persia which is another incredible one with great music also. Super Ghouls N Ghosts was too hard but such great graphics and poor music. (Sat down and finished it over about a week about 2 years ago on the ZSNES emulator.) Renting games from the video store was a good way to "make sure" a game was good or not before buying. They were so expensive. I really only appreciated Actraiser and Castlevania IV many years after. I only bought about 5 games and the last SNES one was Mega Man X on March 17 1994. Mega Man V for NES I bought later that year and it was my last video game. Disappointing music. I never bought Mega Man VI.
I still have this sealed in the box. Is it worth anything? I'm pretty sure I paid full retail for it which was $199.99 from Fry's electronics a very long time ago. And the back says this This is still sealed in the original wrap that it was sold in. I've never opened it. I bought it and never used it.
Yes that is a good one James. Has the gold plated 3.5mm audio jacks like mine. And an extra front tower bay interface. I am sure they are all over e-bay. Sealed it would be worth a lot more PS: You didn't miss anything by skipping past the video game generation. I would say 99.998% of the games were rubbish to put in kindly. My favourite is Tetris. And my Dad bought that one in August 1990. He had read about it in a newspaper, this crazy addictive mind game from Russia that was sweeping the world at that time... so off we went to K-Mart and it was $59.99 Canadian. I was curious as hell to see what it was all about. I got a weird brain fever for a few nights and could hardly sleep after playing the first days. Didn't tell anyone. So much mental re-wiring had to go on It really was a "Soviet Mind Game" like they said...
I finally found a owner's manual for it from the creative website and then I downloaded it and read it and supposedly it's from the year 2002. I have a few other PC parts like some win modems and other stuff I just don't use or need anymore. Still sealed in the box. I also tried finding an image of my exact box on the net and nobody has one. They have it older and newer but not mine.
Wow, it's great that you're still using gear from 2001. Have you had any compatibility issues using it with newer OS's? Or are you still on WinXP? I think high-end soundblasters sound great already. And if you're using the optical signal you won't have any ground intereference issues, getting the best possible signal out of your SB. Some things you could explore if you're interested in varying your setup (though I think what you've got is great): Check out MIDI sound modules, like the venerable Roland SC-88. There are many good-sounding devices out there that support General MIDI. Each will have their own 'soundfont' so your MIDI files will sound slightly different. That might be a good thing or a bad thing! Get a hardware effects processor so you can manipulate reverb and chorus, etc to give the music a bit more ambience.
I just have various old PC's running different systems, XP and Win7, that are never connected to the internet. So fast and efficient with, for example, old year 2000 Soundforge 5.0 for editing etc., E-bay is full of the great old Xeon server motherboards etc,. so it is easy to build up dirt cheap "old" systems in majestic server cases and do everything safely offline and under full user control without "new" big tech garbage. (I say: "No more updates pal. You had 113.67 versions to get it right buddy. Stop the lying. The 18Mb version you put out 20 years ago was better...F off with your around the clock interference and surveillance...")
