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lilo's reviews:

UFO: Enemy Unknown: Game rip
"FM music, OPL chip music" (by lilo, 7 Oct 2006) [8/10]
This page http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/console_and_pc_music.html

has an article "FM Music on the PC"

explains that there are few PC games with FM music worth listening to. That COULD be true, because FM music is from analog+digital synthetisers and does not represent music made from samples like MOD - tracker music.

That is a problem. Emulating FM music takes <1% success. It would require emulation of electrical analog circuits which takes more than current CPU's can handle.

Here is a link to a real OLP3 chip recording http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/downloads/ski_or_die.mp3 (crazy Ski or die game)


QUOTATION:

One reason why I'm including an mp3 here is that no emulation of the OPL chip sounds exactly right. notice the loss in bass which is part of the sound, not to mention the screaming, distorted, fizzy lead sound which all the software emulations fail to replicate. The percussion kind of sucks but that's how it is in most OPL music.

The music in UFO Enemy Unknown, on the other hand, has some great UFO FM sound effects (difficult to emulate with a sample based card) and guitar-like FM sounds. The tunes are also long and complex and have lots going on at once, almost prog rock in that sense.

UFO: Enemy Unknown: Game rip
"midi performance" (by lilo, 7 Oct 2006) [8/10]
I am a bit disappointed from the midi, but still glad I got it. Many sounds are too much different from the original game one. Examples:

Tactical Section - volume of the bruum, bruuum is way too much over the original, also the instruments sound weird.

Compared to the original - it tries to sound like playing real instruments instead of pure synthetics in which it sounded much better.

The intercept, for example has problem with timing when playing in winamp. When playing from beginning, there is a lower note and then the classic intercept tune. The first sound is not played when you rewind the track. Also, the original synthetic sounded a bit more impactful.

How to restore music with original synthetizers of those days?

Not sure, but I feel that there were few more notes in the Story tune in the beginning. Alse my version seemed to alternate after a couple of minutes. (or it was only in the geoscape only?)

But otherwise I am happy I found it on the net.