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descriptioncore history

Format
Sega Genesis

Categories
G roovy | E xotic | M ayhem | S lap bass | GEMS in pants
^{(If anyone has a better name for the overall category than "GEMS in pants" let me know)}


TLDR
Make songs using only the FM patches that came with GEMS (and whatever samples and PSG instruments you want).


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If you were an American game composer writing Genesis music from 1989 to 1991, chances are that you weren't having a good time. Few sound tools were available (all the good ones were stuck in Japan), meaning that composers were stuck with assembly code or a hex editor. And the official documentation on the Genesis sound hardware wasn't very useful to musicians who had never worked with FM synthesis before. The results were... hit or miss.

This was bad for Sega of America, whose marketing strategy relied on a steady stream of impressive, Western-developed games that appealed to American kids. To establish a minimum bar of quality for music on the system, they commissioned frequent collaborator Recreational Brainware

to develop a better toolchain.


GEMS

(Genesis Editor for Music and Sound Effects), first released in 1992, was an all-in-one solution to Genesis audio. A DOS PC running GEMS served as the middleman between a MIDI sequencer and the Genesis hardware, allowing composers to use MIDI tools that they were already familiar with. In an effort to make FM synthesis less daunting to newcomers, the program shipped with a library of over 100 unique presets that could be tweaked in the included FM editor.


Unfortunately, this combination of "automatic MIDI conversion" and "lots of included patches" meant that lots of composers (especially in the immediate aftermath of GEMS' release) took the easy way out. Early GEMS soundtracks used nothing *but* the default instruments, creating a wash of samey-sounding games - the world's first chiptune midislap.


Your task in this battle is to participate in this grand tradition of sound design corner-cutting. You must make the best Genesis music you can, while using only the 105 original presets for your FM instrumentation. You can use as many of your own samples and PSG instruments as you want, but the FM patches must be completely unaltered (except for channel volume, obviously). You can try to sound as "GEMS-like" or "un-GEMS-like" as you want - or do a mix of both!


The bitpack contains all of the original GEMS patches, converted to TFI for convenience. If you need these in another format for some obscure reason (most tools should be able to open TFI without any issues), you can download GEMS

and open the original PATCH.BNK file with this.

Games that exhibit the stereotypical "GEMS sound"
Kid Chameleon

Greendog

Mick & Mack: Global Gladiators

Batman Returns

Games that avoid gratuitous use of the most common default patches
Pirates of Dark Water

X-Men 2: Clone Wars

Vectorman

Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3

Most of these use a lot of custom patches, so they're not super helpful for this battle, but I just kinda felt like sharing.


See Also
List of games that use GEMS

(or custom GEMS derivatives)
A video

that goes into more detail about the origins of GEMS and how it works


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ZIP file with TFI versions of the GEMS instruments (for the bitpack): here

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