Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis - Remastered Soundtrack

[Laserschwert]

Moving over from off-topicking my own Sam & Max soundtrack thread, here's the dedicated thread to my remastering project of the Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis soundtrack. To be fair, with several unfinished projects in the works, I can't guarantee anything, though.

As stated in that other thread, in my opinion, all remasters or re-arrangements of this soundtrack (even the most recent ones, sorry!) fell flat in a big way. Using fancy virtual instruments isn't all there is to it, if you can't even get the performance of the most essential part of any Indy soundtrack right: the brass. Especially the trumpets playing the A and B themes of the Raiders's March (which, as you die-hard fans might know, is the actual name of the Indiana Jones theme). Originally composed by John Williams as two options for the main theme, the B theme turned into the bridge of the track, since Spielberg liked both enough to be used.

So, to make sure that I could actually do better, I tried my hands on the playable introduction of the game, which opens to the Indiana Jones logo with the A theme, followed by some sneaky underscore while you rummage the Barnett College's attic in search of some unknown artifact. As Indy gets knocked down and comes crashing through the ceiling of another floor, our unconscious hero gets a rest while the B theme accompanies a few more on-screen credits. This back and forth between suspenseful underscore and jump-scare transitions to different versions of the B theme culminates in Indy finding the horned Atlantean statue to a rousing crescendo that fades out while Indy leaves the college's main building to deliver the artifact to his mysterious accent-wielding client in his on-campus office.

 

Was I actually successful in turning the MT-32 beeps and boops into something properly orchestral? You decide:

 

 

A bit of tech-talk: For this I didn't use any of the pre-arranged MIDIs that were released over the years, instead I started with clean rips of all the iMUSE snippets of this game (courtesy of @Serge), which I've combined and arranged from scratch. The introduction already consisted of 11 different cues I needed to combine, and VGMRip's AdLib rip of the music (and some Let's Plays on YouTube) provided a great template. As far as software and virtual instruments go, I'm using Reaper as my DAW and mainly East West's Hollywood Orchestra series, Project Sam's LA Scoring Strings and VSL's Fanfare Trumpets, with a few additional instruments here and there.

Anyway, with the main theme out of the way, my plan is to tackle the end credits suite next, as it lets me get my hands on several different themes from the game in one go (plus another go at the Raider's March, yay!).

Edited February 7 by Laserschwert

[TimeGentleman]

Very nice, looking forward to the credits suite!

[Vainamoinen]

Absolutely brilliant. You're definitely knocking previous arrangements out of the park. The opening might be one of the most difficult pieces to do, because it incorporates the Raiders March so prominently. I've heard that a four digit number of times in its fully orchestrated variant(s), and yours still sounds great.

I've listened myself unconscious with the existing stuff on youtube over the years, especially the 3:16:20 version that somebody uploaded in 2014. I'm still obsessed with the idea they'd reboot FOA and use an orchestra for the soundtrack. And I still think that overall, it's the best that Clint, Michael and Peter have ever done. Yes, better than Monkey Island even.

 

Not looking that forward to the end credits actually, as that would be more Raiders March. 😅 An actual track that draws on Fate of Atlantic specific themes and introduces the motifs would be "Sophia's presentation". And of course, there's all the themes while exploring Atlantis that really stuck with me and elevate the soundtrack above a mere hommage to John Williams' undoubted genius.

 

I'm looking forward to hearing how you're progressing.

[Laserschwert]

The thing is, I wanted to get the intro and end credits out of the way first, as those contain basically the original arrangement of the Raider's March. And since it's so well known, those take the most work, just to make them sound like we are used to. The rest of the soundtrack allows for much more freedom in interpreting them, so it's a lot easier to not make them sound "wrong".

 

I think besides the Atlantis Presentation track I am really looking forward to doing The Coldest Year of My Life, which is basically the Marion/Leia/Han Solo & The Princess theme of this game.

Edited December 9, 2023 by Laserschwert

[Vainamoinen]

I just googled myself into the John Williams fan forums trying to find out whether it's "Raider's March", "Raiders' March" or just "Raiders March". 🤣

 

My official soundtrack versions, both Raiders and Crusade, choose no apostrophe at all. My Spielberg/Williams Collaboration CD tracklist (that one with the Struzan cover) has the apostrophe after the s. So, uhm, it seems like nobody actually knows for certain, but an apostrophe's after the r would mean that there's only one raider in the movie – which the title already contradicts.

[TimeGentleman]

You could interpret it as being Indy's march (rather than that of the movie "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" or of the multiple raiders of the lost ark in the movie) and therefore referring to him as the singular habitual raider...

[Laserschwert]

[Vainamoinen]

I hope you're still working on this project, because the intro section was just 🤩🎵🤍.

 

On a related note, I'm looking for an active online forum-ish place to discuss video game music, and one that is so rabid about the whole thing that people would even discuss piano sheet music. I can't find anything like that. Does anybody have a suggestion?

[Laserschwert]

The only thing I've done is starting work on the end credits, but most of it is still very rough:
 

Laserschwert · EndCreditsTest

 

Edited February 7 by Laserschwert

[TimeGentleman]

That track seems to have disappeared from your account...

[Laserschwert]

Should work now.

[Staple Remover]

This is incredible, I am so excited to see how it all turns out. I have the Rune Realms album of Fate of Atlantis but this feels so grounded into the game that I am reliving it. 

On 1/16/2024 at 3:47 AM, Vainamoinen said:

On a related note, I'm looking for an active online forum-ish place to discuss video game music, and one that is so rabid about the whole thing that people would even discuss piano sheet music. I can't find anything like that. Does anybody have a suggestion?

I would love a place like this to just discuss favorite video game music. They’re my favorite instrumental tracks to just vibe out to. 

[LGH_]

Fantastic arrangement of an already fantastic original. Listening to this brought back so many fond memories!

 

Fate of Atlantis was actually my first iMuse / nonstop-music experience from Clint/Peter/Michael, since I‘ve played it before Monkey 2. I remember being completely overwhelmed by this back then!

[Laserschwert]

Since getting side-tracked is my thing, I took a look at the latter part of the "National Archaeology" track, which is the "The Coldest Year of My Life" cue, playing as Indy talks about Sophia. And doing that, I noticed something odd: If I'm not mistaken, the AdLib soundtrack seems to play a different theme at the end of the track than the MT-32 version. Anybody know more about this? I like them both, so I'll see if I can combine them.

 

Laserschwert · National Archaeology Ending MT32

 

Laserschwert · National Archaeology Ending AdLib

 

Edited February 7 by Laserschwert

[Laserschwert]

Also, since DMs aren't working for me anymore, @Serge, is there a tool to quickly convert the instrument mappings of MT-32 MIDIs to General MIDI? I only found MT2GM.exe, which won't run under modern 64-bit Windows.

[Serge]

1 hour ago, Laserschwert said:

Also, since DMs aren't working for me anymore, @Serge, is there a tool to quickly convert the instrument mappings of MT-32 MIDIs to General MIDI? I only found MT2GM.exe, which won't run under modern 64-bit Windows.

 

Not that I know of - also, it's not a 1:1 process - MT-32 has many more variations of e.g. strings or pianos than General MIDI does. But I could probably relatively quickly do a simple command line tool that takes a MIDI input file and outputs a remapped file, based on a text list of mappings. I.e., a text list like:

 

1   : 5           # remap (MT-32) instrument 1 to (GM) instrument 5
2   : 4           # remap (MT-32) instrument 2 to (GM) instrument 4
3   : 3
5   : 2           
...
126 : 81
127 : 86

 

SCUMMRev 1 did it (it's what we used as a basis for conversion of HighLand MIDIs) - but SCUMMRev 1 hasn't existed for almost 25 years. 🙂

[Laserschwert]

A command line tool would be great! It would be enough to just use the next best General MIDI instrument, just to get a quick overview of the track. Does the attached file help? (this one seems to leave out the ones that are identical)

 

mt2gm.txt

Edited January 31 by Laserschwert

[Serge]

Sure, I'll try and see if I can cook something together - probably won't be until in a few days, though.

[Laserschwert]

Anyway, I finalized "The Coldest Year of My Life", which is such a beautiful track! Hard to believe, something like this to show up in a 90s point-and-click adventure.

 

And yeah, the Adlib and MT-32 versions of the track use different endings as Indy leaves for New York.

Edited February 7 by Laserschwert

[Bertrand Guégan]

Absolutely brilliant!! It takes lot of effort and work to make it sound this realistic, just by using Vsts (even the best ones). Kudos!

[Serge]

On 1/31/2024 at 3:06 PM, Laserschwert said:

A command line tool would be great! It would be enough to just use the next best General MIDI instrument, just to get a quick overview of the track. Does the attached file help? (this one seems to leave out the ones that are identical)

 

Looks right. Almost done (although I have done zero testing yet while writing all the code...), and for good measure I made a quick verb on the command that lists out the mapping with instrument names (if it has a "comment" about what standards are used on both sides - only support GM and MT-32 so far, though):

 

'

 

ETA: Does seem to be working - at least from doing byte comparisons on input and output. It also allows inputting raw ROL chunks (and other chunks) - i.e., it just removes the LEC headers from those. Still need to test the part of the functionality where it remaps iMUSE instrument changes in addition to the standard Program Change messages. So, will probably be ready tomorrow.

Edited February 2 by Serge

[Laserschwert]

Wow, this is coming along nicely, and fast! Thanks a lot for this. I didn't realize iMUSE would send instrument change commands as well. It would be great to have those properly converted to GM patch changes as well.

[Serge]

1 hour ago, Laserschwert said:

Wow, this is coming along nicely, and fast! Thanks a lot for this. I didn't realize iMUSE would send instrument change commands as well. It would be great to have those properly converted to GM patch changes as well.

 

For now, they most likely won't be. It'll just change the instruments in the actual messages that involve instruments. Changing them to patch changes would rarely make sense anyway, since they'll often also be transposed etc.

 

iMUSESequencer does allow dumping all the iMUSE messages, though (iMUSESequencer dump -i filename.mid😞

 

The numbers on the left are <bar>.<beat>.<ticks> [<seconds>] (<total ticks>). So, here you can see that it changes the instrument on track 7 to 85 at bar 13, beat 4, tick 398 - if the current hook ID (set by SCUMM) is 1. You'll also note it disables that track at the same time (hook-part-enable with state 0) - and that there are no hook-part-enable that enable it (they all have "state: 0". That's because in this case, iMUSE will disable the track based on the hook, and a command in the SCUMM script for the room will reenable the track later. iMUSE in general is a bit like untangling spaghetti of MIDI hooks and markers intertwining with SCUMM calls to determine what's actually going on - often SCUMM will do something that might as well have been done through hooks in the MIDI - and vice versa. 🙂

 

Edited February 2 by Serge

[Laserschwert]

To be fair, I don't need to replicate all the interactivity anyway. I just pick and choose whatever sounds the best (and usually I just want to have the most complete track possible, so muting channels isn't even desired).

[Serge]

1 hour ago, Laserschwert said:

To be fair, I don't need to replicate all the interactivity anyway. I just pick and choose whatever sounds the best (and usually I just want to have the most complete track possible, so muting channels isn't even desired).

 

Well, what's done here (Stan's Theme) is setting up all the variations that happen for each repeat of the theme - adding instruments, removing them, transposing them, and changing them for other instruments. 🙂

 

Anyway, here's the first release... Like I said, it's "cooked together" - very quickly done, but seems to leave the MIDIs exactly the same, except for remapping all instrument references.

 

https://github.com/Jither/iMUSE-Sequencer/releases/tag/Misty-1.0.0

 

Just decompress the .zip to a folder. The command line provides help (and examples) for each verb (two of them - one for the actual remapping, one for getting the mapping in a more readable format with instrument names). Just type misty or misty help. It then lists the verbs - you can get help for those by typing misty <verbname> help. (Also works to just type misty remap - since it will find that the required input file parameter is missing, so it will show the help for the verb - it doesn't, however, work that way for misty mapinfo - because the mapinfo verb can be called with no parameters).

 

So, misty remap file.mid is the simplest usage, which will use the default mapping file that's included (the one you sent, but with a single changed line - which allows the mapping info "verb" to find the instrument names). You can create multiple mapping files and specify a different one with -m path-to-file or --mapping path-to-file. After remapping, it outputs to a file with the same name, in the same folder, except for replacing the extension with ".remapped.mid". (Note that it will *not* warn or prompt if the output path already exists - it will just overwrite it). You can also just specify a second file name that it should output to, rather than letting it create a default output path.

 

ETA: Forgot: Requires .NET 8.0 runtime - https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet/8.0 - the one named ".NET Runtime 8.0.x" will do, but you might as well install the one named ".NET Desktop Runtime 8.0.x" - just adds support for GUI apps (SCUMMRev 8, if it ever appears, will be one of those).

Edited February 2 by Serge