One of the features carried over from my first website (amazingly still available) is a digital rendition of the ingame music from the Amiga version of Defender of the Crown. Back in the year 2000 I had this to say:
Defender of the Crown is a computer game by Cinemaware, originally released in 1986 for the Commodore Amiga and later ported to every major platform (including the PC, C64, ZX80, NES and Atari ST). The game is branded an "interactive movie" and was one of the earliest Amiga games released. It was used by many Amiga enthusiasts to demonstrate the abilities of the computer, and with good reason: the game had beautifully drawn graphics by James D. Sachs and never-before experienced atmosphere.
One of the most prominent aspects of the game is its music. I've heard the game's music throughout my childhood as I went to a neighbouring Amiga owner and played this and many other wonderful Amiga games. The music was composed by Jim Cuomo, who now pursues a career as a musician.
The music here is recorded from the Amiga version via an Amiga emulator, specifically Fellow 0.3.3. Due to an emulator handicap the WAV files produced had some bugs which I fixed using Sound Forge 4.0. The tunes are now almost identical to the original Amiga ones (as verified using my A500+), depsite a somewhat shoddy MP3 conversion using MusicMatch 4.0.
The tunes provided are distributed with permission from Jim Cuomo, who was also gracious enough to send me one of his CDs entitled Gameplay, which contains excellent revisited tunes from several computer games he had composed music for. He also permitted me to post the Defender of the Crown tunes from the same CD - they will be added in a few days.
I am still, unfortunately, missing the Love theme (rescuing the princess) and the victory/loss themes, the latter of which will be posted as soon as I finish working on them.
At the time free hosts were usually limited to 5 or 10mb per user, and my having no desire to pay for storage meant it took more than a few days to post the Gameplay sound snippets - more like 5 years. Also, scratch the comments about Fellow 0.3.3 and MusicMatch 4.0; I've re-recorded some of the tunes from my A500+ (softkick'ed to 1.3) and re-encoded everything with OGG Vorbis (which means stereo [in the new recordings] and much higher quality for just slightly larger files - well worth it in my opinion). When I find the time, all themes will be re-recorded from a proper A1000 (512k, kick 1.0) through a more modern soundcard with lower SNR. I also pledge to re-rip and re-encode the GamePlay tracks properly.
Avast! Files off ye starboard bow!
In-game recordings:
GamePlay CD tracks: