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 a shrug. Although there's a decent editor for PC speaker-based squawks, Sound Blaster support only came around with the software's 2.0 release, and the 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.

Game-Maker came with a limited set of stock pieces, which tend to populate most games. Designers also got clever, tracking down .CMF files on bulletin boards and hacking existing commercial or shareware games -- especially early Epic Megagames releases -- for their music. Most users built up a small personal library to plug in the way a film editor uses temp tracks. If Game-Maker were ever to support a better format, or come with a custom music editor, then those temp tracks would get swapped out. Except none of that ever happened.

Stock tracks

These are the tracks included in the Game-Maker sample library, and used to track all of RSD's demo games. They are, therefore, the most commonly reused pieces.

See: Stock tracks

Common tracks

In later versions, Game-Maker came with many more demo games by a variety of authors. The following tracks were included in those games, and so may also be considered in regular distribution.

See: Common tracks

Original composers

• David Barras
• Jim Faux
• Mark Hadley
• Eric-Jon Waugh

Links

• Creative Music File format @ moddingwiki
• CMF @ Videogame Music Preservation Wiki
• [openmpt.org/ Open MPT] - Modplug tracker (for converting tracker files to MIDI)
• MID2CMF -- MIDI format 0 to CMF format
• CMFStuff - Utilities For Working With CMF Music Files