Dark Forces Music Patch file - Xim's Star Wars Doom mod for Doom II

For Variety's sake, I wanted to put together a midi playlist of Star Wars tunes with the XSWM framework. I downloaded a zip of the DF soundtrack, copy pasted all the tracks that sounded exciting, and scoured the internet for a few more midis based off the film's scores to bring the track number to 32.

I hated it.

For one, Dark Forces used the experimental "imuse" technology developed for dynamic music when Kyle is in and out of combat, which means all of the "Fight" songs on the DF OST have these long stretches of silence between short stings of transition music. Even with the songs that do loop well--the "Stalk" and "Boss" variety--it's like dancing on eggshells because they have imuse coding, too, which leads to a bug in "Boss 014" (the badass final boss song) where when the 3 minute song ends, instead of just starting back at the beginning, it makes this terrible infinite ear-rape sound.

As if that wasn't enough, I wasn't happy with the midis I found on the web. Bajakian's work for Dark Forces was composed with Midi instruments in mind, while the internet midis feel directly transposed from the film score, which meant that the songs sounded just different enough in their instrumentation to the DF OST that it made the whole playlist feel inconsistent.

To make long a story short, I went back to the drawing board and pulled out all of the Midi songs from the internet and the DF songs that didn't work, which left me with a playlist of 11 tracks. I decided to go for quality rather than quantity, and endeavored to get the playlist to the 20 track number established by your original XSWM.

I experimented with different ways to fill out the rest of the playlist, searching for tracks on MuseScore as well as attempting some compositions myself. After doing some research, I remembered that Clint Bajakian also worked on the OST for Tie Fighter and X Wing, which came out around the same time as DF and were recorded in Midi format. While both scores are very jingle-heavy, with tracks that are only around 30 seconds long, I managed to build up the playlist to the goal of 20 songs, all with a unifying and cohesive Bajakian sound. I slowed down a piano-only version of one my songs for the M_READ track, and voila-- DARK FORCES MUSIC X (The "X" in this case stands for "Xim").