![]() My two favorites were FluidR3 and CrisisGeneralMidi3.01, but in the end I went with Crisis (although its size might deter others most of the soundfonts aren’t too huge but CrisisGeneralMidi3.01 is several gigabytes in size). I spent a lot of time watching the Ara Fell title screen, listening to its excellent theme music while switching between these four soundfonts and attempting to determine which I liked best. I sought recommendations on the GOG forums and the VirtualMIDISynth page (VirtualMIDISynth is the software I use to select a soundfont instead of the Windows default), and eventually narrowed it down to four options: ChoriumRevA, FluidR3, SGM-V2, and CrisisGeneralMidi3.01 (many fans like Timbres of Heaven too, but I thought it was a little too bombastic in the comparisons I’d heard). Instead, I could look around for the soundfont that simply sounded best. But since Ara Fell is a new release, I didn’t have to worry about accurately emulating period-appropriate sound. Windows operating systems offer a standard set of sounds to be used with MIDI, but these can be replaced that’s what my SC-55 soundfont does, by emulating the sound of the type of hardware a Betrayal at Krondor player might have had back in 1993. But Ara Fell apparently opted to use MIDI for the music. These days, storage space is hardly a concern, so most game soundtracks are delivered as full-on audio files, ensuring everyone’s music sounds the same. The downside is that the actual sound is dependent on each player’s hardware. This was used in most older games because MIDI takes up way less space on disks than storing full audio files would. a grand piano middle C at the right time, and your computer generates the sound itself. So if a game uses MIDI music, it tells your computer to play e.g. If you are unfamiliar with MIDI, I gave a detailed description of it when writing about Betrayal at Krondor, but I’ll summarize briefly here: standing for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, MIDI is a method of transmitting music that does not actually send any audio, it just sends signals to play notes. The fact that I was seeing this error now meant that Ara Fell must use MIDI music, something I was not expecting. What? Then I remembered: I’d installed this soundfont nearly three years ago to emulate the old Roland SC-55 MIDI sound module in order to get more authentic music when playing Betrayal at Krondor. The first thing that happened when I launched the game was a strange error about my SC-55 soundfont. Naturally, I decided to give this overhauled version a spin. Co-founder Stephen Anthony then opened up his old Ara Fell prototype for the first time in years, and decided that with his team at Stegosoft they could polish it up, rewrite the script, tweak everything, and actually finish it. Apparently the developers, Stegosoft Games (a four-person team containing the author of the original Ara Fell prototype) had been developing a different game and its engine, but this proved a little too much for them, so they were searching for a new project. ![]() I had to double-check to confirm that yes, this is indeed the same game that I tried all those years ago. Then, out of the blue, I saw the news that Ara Fell was completed and on sale a couple of months ago (there’s also a demo available). ![]() But, as with so many such projects, it was abandoned when its author realized it was too ambitious. Ara Fell was one of the most memorable, with a beautiful world of floating islands, some nice twists on traditional Japanese-style role-playing game mechanics, and the beginning of an interesting tale. I delved into the vast catalog of games made with RPG Maker, and found a few gems (including Master of the Wind, which I’ve written about here). I first played an early prototype version of Ara Fell years ago, long before I started this blog, when I had more time to scour the internet for free games. As always, you may click on images to view larger versions.
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