Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Gold Box Adlib Collection

May 1st, 2024 niki

Been a while ! Here’s a collection of songs from the vast Gold Box Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and co PC games. I chose to include Adlib versions only for coherency, except for Pool of Radiance which is Tandy (and was also used for Curse of the Azure Bonds).

Pretty atmospheric medieval tunes here, as often on this blog. I didn’t record any of this myself and compiled various recordings I gathered on the web along the years.

Enjoy ~

>>> Download <<<

Romancing SaGa 3 Piano Sheets / 楽しいバイエル併用 ロマンシングサガ(3)

December 26th, 2019 niki

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Hi everyone !

So after decades of searching, I finally acquired this 1995 book and gifted it to my brother for Christmas. He’s a piano/accordion player and we’ve both been passionate about this game and it’s soundtrack since playing it in the 90s.

We both decided to share the sheets with the world. Hopefully it will inspire many other musicians to share their takes on those amazing compositions. :)

> Here are the sheets <

And here’s my bro giving a first try (literally) at Battle 2:

Merry Christmas everyone :)

Mahjong Bishoujo Den – Ripple PC98 Game Recording

May 27th, 2019 niki

folder After quite a while, here a new pc98 game recording.
Mahjong Bishōjo Den: Ripple is an RPG hentai mahjong game from Foresight. This developer is not the most famous on the PC98, but is probably best known for Mado Gakuin R.
Only a little information can be found about this game and I could not find the name of the composer. I played the beginning to tag some of the tracks, but since I suck at mahjong, I could
find a proper name for only half of the tracks…
Hope you’ll enjoy!

Olive

>>> Download <<<

Saladedemaïs ~ Obscure SNES RPGs Vol.6

October 19th, 2018 niki

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Volume 6 !

There’ll be a vol.7 after all …

Enjoy ~

>>> Download <<<



Saladedemaïs ~ Obscure SNES RPGs Vol.5

October 2nd, 2018 niki

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Volume 5 ~

Enjoy ~

>>> Download <<<



Saladedemaïs ~ Obscure SNES RPGs Vol.4

September 29th, 2018 niki

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Volume 4 ~

Enjoy ~

>>> Download <<<






Saladedemaïs ~ Obscure SNES RPGs Vol.3

September 23rd, 2018 niki

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Volume 3 !

Enjoy ~

>>> Download <<<






Saladedemaïs ~ Obscure SNES RPGs Vol.2

September 19th, 2018 niki

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And here’s Volume 2 !

Enjoy ~

>>> Download <<<






Saladedemaïs ~ Obscure SNES RPGs Vol.1

September 17th, 2018 niki

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It’s time to finally start releasing a long winded project that has now spanned several years. I undertook the task of collecting the music of every single RPG, ARPG and Tactical games ever released on the SNES a good 7/8 years ago. Collecting them took a while, and listening to them took even longer. I’m still short of a few but it’s close enough.

Obscure SNES RPGs is the result of those long listening hours over the years. Anything that stood out was rated along the way and compiled in ~100 tracks volumes. There will be 6 volumes total, each packing around 4 hours of music.

Here’s the first one. Hope you enjoy ~

>>> Download <<<

Saladedemais Compilation ~ Olive’s All Time Favorites

September 6th, 2018 niki

Hi guys! I would like to share with you some vgm compilations I’ve just made. It is basically the tracks I really loved while I was listening to vgm during the last 5 years or so. I hope you will enjoy these selections, and maybe discover some great soundtracks.

Olive~

Night VGM

August 24th, 2018 niki

Time flies. Anyone still visiting here ? Here’s a little something for our fellow night owls ~

ps: comments are fixed !

Saladedemaïs Amiga Compilation Vol.2

January 2nd, 2017 niki

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Here the second volume of the Amiga compilation. I have still lots of soundtracks to listen to, so you can expect more compilations in the following months.
I hope you’ll enjoy!

Olive~



>>> Download <<<



Saladedemaïs Amiga Compilation Vol.1

November 9th, 2016 niki

amiga

We’re back after almost 2 years. Sorry guys! But I didn’t waste my time and I’ve listened to tons of Amiga game music. Even if I really like the “Amiga sound”, not all music is worth listening. So I’ve made some selections I would like to share with you.

I haven’t played all those games, so when I don’t know where the music is from in the game, I just tagged “Ingame”.

More compilations will come (shortly I hope)!

Special thanks to Titan and Moonchild for their high-quality rips.

Enjoy! Olive~

>>> Download <<<

Hole Chaser PC88 Game Recording

February 19th, 2015 Leonid

Hole Chaser is a PC88 game from 1990. The game is old and the gameplay looks like… chasing holes, but the music is great. This is one of the best uses of bass and drums I’ve heard. The compositor Masahiro Kajihara is best known for Valis 2 or Princess Maker 2.

This soundtrack includes both OPN and OPNA versions as there are only few tracks and they are almost completely different. The tracks are encoded to MP3 from Hoot. Thanks to the Hoot community for making the music available and to Kurohane for his HootFavoritter, which makes it much easier to compile the tracks.

Enjoy !

>>> Download <<<

Necronomicon PC98 & FM Towns Music

November 15th, 2013 niki

Necronomicon is a Japanese horror adventure game, set in the fictional world of author H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos – a series of interconnected stories on the theme of unspeakable cosmic horrors.

So yes, expect dark, atmospheric music here. Teioh introduced me to the FM Towns redbook, and I was indeed really impressed with the quality of it’s organ and choirs driven melodies. I decided to give the HOOT set a listen and was there again impressed, this time by how dark and gloomy MUSE manages to make his FM music sound. There is only one fast track on there, and what a track. The Deep One is what finished to convince me to record the whole thing.

So there you are, an obscure PC98 soundtrack AND its’ (kinda) arrange album. :p

Credits to Teioh for finding it, and the tracklist <3 Enjoy ~ >>> Download <<<

Tengai Makyo II Complete Music Recording

November 8th, 2013 niki

In 1997, when everyone was about the PlayStation, Saturn and Nintendo 64, I bought a PC Engine. Take that, trendy retro kids ~

Unlike many of my purchases at the time, during that golden era where 8/16 bit stuff was so cheap because of the new generation systems, I paid quite a bit for that one. Because even back, then it was rare. Why did I buy it ? For many reasons, actually. The system had always fascinated me, with it’s pixel graphics, CDDA sounds and animated cut scenes. And because the word among the elite nerds of the time was that the King among Kings of Japanese RPGs was on it. Tengai Makyo II.

I was playing a lot of Japanese RPGs back then. In Japanese. Not speaking the language. While that may seem absurd nowadays, you have to put this back in context and realize that there were very few translated JRPGs back then. Sure, I didn’t always get what was going on, but guessing the story and making it advance despite the language barrier felt like an extra layer of adventure to me. Could I do it again ? Nope. Did I ever have as much pleasure playing games as I did back then ? Double nope.

To play a Japanese RPG during these days, you first had to even hear about it. Sure, there was a specialized press, but not every kids could afford a monthly subscription, and even if you did there was still a good chance some games wouldn’t get reviewed in the import sections which were pretty limited.

So you had the chance to read a 20 lines review about this new Squaresoft game called Bahamut Lagoon. Great. Now you had to actually find it. Yeah, even living in a big city like Paris, finding import games could prove quite a challenge, and would often cost you an harm if you wanted it early on. Thankfully, there was the second hand market. Import games, especially RPGs, would often be tossed in a corner to collect dust if they were ever resold in shops, ’cause really there wasn’t a lot of people who wanted to play those back then. And that’s when you had to pop in at the right time. I’ll always remember my first Chrono Trigger J copy I snagged for nothing in one of these shops. <3 So you had your game. Now you could pop it in your EU/JAP cartridge adapter, or into your Japanese or US SFC/SNES if you were fancy enough to have one. BTW, remember how the SNES of choice used to be the US one because you could saw the edges of the cartridge slot so both US and Jap games would fit in ? Hi5 if you had one of those. Anyways, yeah, playing Japanese RPGs in Japanese wasn't usually that hard. If you got stuck you could always go back and talk to every NPCs to unlock whatever was blocking the story. That was my usual line of action. And yes, it was fun. No really it was !

Back to Tengai Makyo II. I was warned before I bought it that this one was hardcore if you didn’t speak Japanese. And guess what ? It was. This game’s universe was huge for it’s time. I mean, look at the map. See how it represents Japan and how it’s separated into regions ? Well, I’ve played some RPGs whose entire worlds would fit in one of those regions. Each would contain a capital, several towns, dungeons, secret areas, and each of those places would have quests linked to them. Worse, as you would progress through the game, you would really often have to go back to a previous region to talk to one specific guy to unlock something, or even complete a whole new quest in a previously visited area. This is the standard for all Tengai Makyo games, but none ever felt as huge as Tengai II did, even Tengai IV on the Saturn. This is what earned the game the title of King of RPGs at the time in Japan. What kind of gaming experience was it for a non Japanese speaking teenager ? Well, it was awesome.

To give you an example, I didn’t feel as immersed in a cohesive game universe until I played Skyrim almost 20 years later. Even without speaking Japanese, you could feel the world live around you. The enormous amount of small towns and NPCs, the different cultures in each regions, their various wildlife and landscapes. Quite an accomplishment for a console which, all in all, was less technologically advanced than a simple SNES. It’s like the development team, Red, decided to see how big you could make a 16 bit RPG on a CD just for the art of it, ’cause there was really no need for RPGs to be that huge to be commercially successful back then. The story, or what I could grasp of the big lines, is a classic archetypal “chosen ones” with a few twists, with each of the main protagonists being super charismatic. Even a relatively “bland” character like Kinou turns out to be a complete surprise as you progress through the game.

Talking about progress, what about mine you ask ? Well, I got though 3/4 of the game, region wise at least. I couldn’t have done it without the help of Greg from French magazine Joypad, and André, lord of all obscure Japanese game things in the Jussieu game shop district in the 90s, which I both harassed on the phone for months whenever I got completely stuck in the game (and it happened a lot “oh yeah to enter that castle you have to unequip all your weapons” duh !). Many thanks to them. If you read this, drop me a line please. <3 As I played through the game, I kept a walkthrough diary of my progress. You can actually see a very abridged, incomplete version of it here, that the friend I lend it to back then posted on the web more than 10 years ago. PJP / Umaro, if you read this, do you still have this ? xD

And then … one fateful night, at 100+ hours gameplay, my PC Engine fried, and I never played the game again since then. Well, that’s a lie. I did. I attempted to replay it several times in the last 10 years, but hey, I’m no teenager anymore. That magic is gone. While I doubt anyone will ever go through the gigantic work of translating it, I would for sure be all over that, though.

What’s left ? Oh right, the music ! Well, the music is just great. You got CDDA orchestral tracks by Joe Hisaishi of Ghibli fame, here, and some even sound a bit like Totoro. The PSG chip sounds are great too, and the whole thing blends really well together. This release consists of the CDDA tracks mixed chronologically with encodings of the HES files. This is a bit more complete than the official CD, and also better sounding imho.

Enjoy !

>>> Download <<<

Amaranth PC98 Game Recording

October 29th, 2013 niki

Alright guys, this one is GREAT !

I was recently introduced to Amaranth through it’s one and only official album, which kinda blew me away. If you can find this album, get it, it’s that good.

What puzzled me is that despite the awesome rock arranges, the original music on it did not sound like PC98 music, but rather like X68K sounds. I painfully translated parts of the booklet to discover that, indeed, it was X68K music, even though the game was never released for it. Weird ? Kinda. Did I want to hear how it sounded on a PC98 ? Hell yeah !!!

So I fired HOOT, and after 2 songs I knew I needed to make a recording of that stuff. Izuru Aki is good. The way he handles the PC98 FM sound, his melodies, the complexity yet catchy-ness of his music places him, in my opinion, among the great composers of this golden era with this release alone. Just listen to it, the whole soundtrack is just packed with memorable themes. I guess none of the games he worked for were ever super popular, ’cause he honestly deserves to be more popular than he is. I’d definitely be ripping more of his stuff.

Anyways, about this archive, the whole thing was recorded from HOOT. The only version available was OPN which makes sense for 1990. The titles were taken from the aforementioned album, and I translated the extra tracks from the HOOT’s XML. The tracks were ordered after the album’s tracklist with the extra tracks scattered here and there.

I’ll grab the occasion to express all my gratitude and admiration to what the western VGM information scene is today. From the people at VGMDB, to people like Knurek who host and organize video game music emulated formats in a flawless way, ripping stuff has never been that comfortable. When I think back of how it was 10 years ago, the least you can say is that things progressed in a tremendous way. So yeah, thanks and congrats, everyone. <3 Anyway, enjoy ! >>> Download <<<

Witches of Barbatus PC88 Music

October 25th, 2013 niki

PC88 RPG music by Masaharu Iwata.

BGM 3 is <3 <3 <3 Enjoy !

>>> Download <<<








Telenet PC88 Collection Vol.2

October 21st, 2013 niki

And there goes Volume 2. Death Bringer really stands out here, imo.

This second volume includes the PC88 versions of:

. Death Bringer (1988)
. Sa.Zi.Ri (1988)
. XZR (1988)
. XZR 2 (1989)

Enjoy !

>>> Download <<<

Telenet PC88 Collection Vol.1

October 20th, 2013 niki

Telenet. One of the names that immediately evoke the pioneer age of Japanese Video Game Music. ^^

This first volume includes the PC88 versions of:

. American Truck (1985)
. Albatross (1986)
. Final Zone (1986)
. Megami Tensei (1987)
. Hanseimei Senki Andorogynus (1987)
. Shinra Banshou (1987)
. Luxsor (1987)
. Pro Yakyuu Fan (1987)

Enjoy !

>>> Download <<<