british home computers were all so bad at games that they had to make up for it by composing music that was as fun to listen to as nintendo and genesis games were to actually play, sometimes on machines with no actual sound hardware. when these men later got hired to compose for platforms that had things like tone generators it was like taking the training weights off. martin galway is legally barred from touching a pipe organ due to the widespread devastation that would result. whole cities on fire
insert joke about the game's cover art depicting Tim Follin composing this music.
I'm extremely partial to his Time Trax OST, a game that never even came out, and his only Genesis compositions. It's lesser known from him but IMO it's maybe his best work.
I also like how like, so the Genesis in PAL is 50hz, in the US it's 60hz. So most tracks on PAL are slower. He composed this on PAL, but made it intentionally a little slow, so that it sounds good on both PAL and NTSC. Very well planned! (Though I think I prefer it at 50hz =w=)
Oh hello are we talking Tim Follin in here? Please enjoy this 39-minute mixtape that also doubles as a text-based chronological retrospective of his work.
One track I need to point out, which is a bit tough to listen to but worth everyone's time, is the title theme to Agent X for the ZX Spectrum, a platform that only had a single channel 1-bit piezo beeper speaker. And in 1986, then-16-year-old Tim Follin went and squeezed five channel music out of the one-channel ZX Spectrum like blood from a rock.
Highly recommend listening to it in the above video, where it appears at 1:35, as it's been EQ'd to save everyone's ears. For anyone looking to hear it its full unfiltered glory, it's embedded below.
Volume warning, but stick around for 0:52, when the instrumentation really picks up.
Again, I have to stress: This is 1-bit audio. A 1-bit waveform has two states: On and Off. Follin had five-channel audio mixed in software, which was pushed to ZX Spectrum's single audio channel and its tiny, tinny piezo speaker.
