My first and only soundtrack for the Super Nintendo (SNES) back in 1995. The sound sources were recorded from a Turtle Beach - Maui sound card. My studio gear at that time consisted in that sound card, a Sound Blaster (the Maui had to be attached to an existing sound card), a pair of speakers and a Roland PC-200 keyboard (which I still have).

The sound chip (APU) was created by Sony and designed by Ken Kutaragi, who was also the designer of the Playstation. The chip was in fact a complete autonomous computer with its own CPU (sort of 6502 with additional instructions), memory (64k), and DSP which produced 8 channels of audio and also some cool effects. The APU communicated with the main console processor using 4 registers, and some kind of communication protocol was used to upload the code and sounds from the game cartridge to the APU during the game. The 64k had to be shared with the sound driver, sound sequence data, samples for the music & fx. Also some memory was required to process the commonly used reverberation effect (if necessary).

The development system for the console was a huge, grey rectangular box that communicated with the PC via a SCSI port and MIDI. My unit didn't work very well... and I had to spend some time every morning switching it on and off a random number of times until it booted correctly. The development tools were very rudimentary (compared to today's standards) and all written to run on MS-DOS only.

The soundtrack is recorded from the "Audio Overload" multi-sound chip emulator. I hope to be able to record the soundtrack from a real machine in the future.

Don't forget to check the second part of this soundtrack here!
https://soundcloud.com/joemcalby/asterix-obelix-snes-part2

Asterix & Obelix - Complete Soundtrack (SNES, 1995) Part 1 / 2

Hi! I've been working in the video game industry since the late 80's, be it as a graphic artist, musician, programmer, designer, or any weird combination of these. Most of my work is known as musician and specially for 8 bit game consoles. If you ever had a gray brick, probably you already listened some of my music!

I used to sign my earlier works as "Joe McAlby" because my name is just plain boring and ordinary. But then the nickname is also ridiculous... too late to change that I suppose!

I rarely compose music nowadays, so I use this account to share some of my past works, and hopefully new experiments too.

Be my guest, enjoy the music, and leave a message if you like it. It'll be appreciated!

Please note that all music here is copyrighted.

Escaping the world through unique songs 👌

Asterix & Obelix - Complete Soundtrack (SNES, 1995) Part 1 / 2

Alberto J. González (McAlby)