Music library

Whereas Game-Maker provided powerful, well-designed utilities for drawing, defining, and organizing graphical elements — tiles, sprites, maps — the sound side of things was always kind of shrug. It wasn’t until the last few versions that the software supported Sound Blaster audio, and formats it supported were… curious. Any digital samples had to be in .VOC format, and any music in the very peculiar .CMF. Whereas even now it is possible to find audio applications that support .VOC, there never really were any popular sequencers or conversion utilities for .CMF.

So what you’ll often find is Game-Maker games with original, brilliant visuals and subversive design that borrow most of their sounds and all of their music from the demo libraries, or even from other Game-Maker games. If the original author complained, the derivative author would issue an update and give him a credit. It was a different era.

Links

• The .CMF file format