Hello all, Admin Mari here.
When this project first shakily lifted off the ground, I thought it’d be beneficial to upload more of Kurayami’s wonderful BGM, composed by PANDA aka Yuki Nakayama, onto YouTube. The PC-98 scene might be a niche hobby, but we’re a small yet dedicated group of fans nevertheless.
Surprisingly, uploading tracks onto YouTube was certainly a learning curve. All 26 of the S98 (PC-98) tracks from Zophar’s Domain (a wonderful old school resource!) had to be converted, track by track. Starting at Track 0 (the Title Screen BGM, In Darkness) the S98 tracks were further reconverted into VGM, and then finally, MP3. During testing, everything sounded fine. But whether it was something in the conversion process, or uploading the BGM to YouTube, sadly, low audio resulted. To complicate matters further, YouTube doesn’t allow direct MP3 uploads, so a workaround had to be used.
Thankfully, this is easily rectified by simply turning up the volume alongside some good quality headphones. The issue with the files themselves have since been fixed.
Where is he now?
Composer and founder of Panda House, PANDA (real name Yuki Nakayama) has, according to his VNDB entry, has been composing music well into the 2010’s. His official website (rather old, from his PANDA HOUSE days) is Wayback Machine archived. There’s not much online about him besides his work with Melody or other past compositions. PANDA’S tracks, whether moody and dark or incredibly groovy, always fit whatever situation the game calls for.
Contrast and compare
Switching gears, we previously mentioned on our Downloads page that if you play the PC-98 version of In Darkness using Neko Project II, you can enjoy either the MIDI Sound Source or FM Sound Source after you configure things:
For whatever reason, the MIDI version of Her Truth (which plays when our heroines discuss their painful pasts) has doubled audio, resulting in something….painful for other reasons, if you enjoy good sounding audio:
For the sake of comparison, the 2 other versions of this piece:
Perhaps there’s some problem with how Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth reads the MIDI sound files, and being able to use either the MIDI-MAPPER or VERIMOUTH sound options via MIDI-OUT would render this entire situation a non-issue? Frankly, I’m not sure.
For the sake of an additional compare and contrast, here’s the MIDI version of Premonition (the menu BGM).
As you can see with its other 2 versions:
there is no audio issue. A handful of the other MIDI tracks do face this strange situation, where the audio’s doubled up.
Mentioned in this post by our other Admin, Jason, the Windows 95 version—configured as a mixed-media disc—doesn’t play nice with running the music component from the CD-ROM drive or the ripped EVE.PCK, etc, files. But not to worry, since we’re currently in the process of fixing this.