Uploaded November 2020 | Updated September 2026, 43 minutes ago
I swear when I record these chunks on my laptop the audio is loud and screams at me, yet when I edit them and put them together they get quiet, but if I turn up the volume in DOS the sounds get punchy and they tend to drown out and distort. Probably an artifact of a sound card that is 26 years old.
Anyways, I've made lots of discoveries about the XMI sound format and why I kept running unto issues with additional instruments randomly strung around the recordings, it's because music has three different conditions that have to be accounted for: Player is not near an enemy, player is near an enemy that is not alerted to the player, and player is near an enemy that is alerted to the player, then different tracks will play over whatever main track is playing depending on the enemy itself. Very complex stuff. I used an XMI editor to remove the sounds that play when enemies are nearby to get as clean of a recording as I can. I then tried to use System Shock's own playback tenancies to make this as close to how System Shock would sound if it didn't have the randomness factor to it.
In any case, I hope you enjoy! This was recorded off my Sound Blaster AWE32 card in pure DOS mode.
I swear when I record these chunks on my laptop the audio is loud and screams at me, yet when I edit them and put them together they get quiet, but if I turn up the volume in DOS the sounds get punchy and they tend to drown out and distort. Probably an artifact of a sound card that is 26 years old.
Anyways, I've made lots of discoveries about the XMI sound format and why I kept running unto issues with additional instruments randomly strung around the recordings, it's because music has three different conditions that have to be accounted for: Player is not near an enemy, player is near an enemy that is not alerted to the player, and player is near an enemy that is alerted to the player, then different tracks will play over whatever main track is playing depending on the enemy itself. Very complex stuff. I used an XMI editor to remove the sounds that play when enemies are nearby to get as clean of a recording as I can. I then tried to use System Shock's own playback tenancies to make this as close to how System Shock would sound if it didn't have the randomness factor to it.
In any case, I hope you enjoy! This was recorded off my Sound Blaster AWE32 card in pure DOS mode.
