Eurocom
Eurocom | |
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Founded | 1988-10-?? |
Closed | 2012-12-06 |
Headquarters | Derby, England, UK |
Eurocom was an English game developer, founded by Mat Sneap, Chris Shrigley, Hugh Binns, Tim Rogers, and Neil Baldwin. They are known for their many movie adaptations of video games including Disney's The Jungle Book, Hercules, and The World Is Not Enough. They have both developed several original titles, as well as ported games to other consoles, most notably Cruis'n World for the Nintendo 64.
On November 23, 2012, most of the company's staff was dropped, and the company stated it would be focusing on mobile games. Shortly after on December 6, 2012, the company closed its doors.
Contents
Music Development
Genesis
Spot Goes to Hollywood and the unreleased Stone Protectors uses the famous GEMS sound driver and software.
For Family Feud, the music was written by Tony Williams in his own sound driver.
Game Boy/Color
Eurocom had a custom sound driver and all games that used the driver were composed by Neil Baldwin. Some of their Game Boy titles were composed by Martin Walker who used his own sound driver.
On their Game Boy Color games, audio was outsourced to Paragon 5. Jake Kaufman wrote the music using Stéphane Hockenhull's Game Boy Tracker.
Game Boy Advance
On Rugrats: I Gotta Go Party, audio was outsourced to Paragon 5. Jake Kaufman wrote music in MIDI format and converted to GBASS sound driver by Stéphane Hockenhull.
On Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Steve Duckworth in collaboration with Semi-Precious Studios (ex-members of Ocean Software) used the MusyX sound tool by Factor 5.
NES
Neil Baldwin, with the help of Eurocom programmer Tim Rogers programmed a sound driver for the NES. Neil had previously programmed a sound driver for the Commodore 64. Neil explained that when Eurocom was developing for the NES, they had received photocopied documents for the Famicom in Japanese, so they had to figure out the console on their own. However, there were two Japanese women they hired who were able to translate the documents. Neil said that though he liked to compose on the NES, he didn't quite like how its RP2A03 sound chip was weaker than the Commodore 64's SID chip. Neil also programmed NTRQ, a piece of music tracker software for the NES. However, he never used it for the games he worked on.
To create music and sound effects, Neil wrote in assembler macros. Neil composed the music to all of Eurocom's NES games. The games James Bond Jr. and Ferrari Grand Prix Challenge also share a song.
The driver was licensed to Gremlin Graphics during the development of HeroQuest.
SNES
Neil Baldwin programmed Eurocom's SNES sound driver. He stated in an interview that the sound driver was MIDI-based, hence its dynamic-channel allocation.
Baldwin composed a number of Eurocom's early SNES soundtracks, but as time went on, Baldwin largely provided audio programming while Steve Duckworth composed the music.
Nintendo 64
According to Neil Baldwin's interview, the composers of Eurocom initially uses Software Creations' N64 Sound Tools. On their last games, composers uses MusyX audio tools and voice compression technology, which developed by Factor 5.
Audio Personell
- Guy Cockcroft
- Ian Livingstone
- Jake Kaufman (from Paragon 5)
- Jeff Tymoschuk
- Jim Croft
- Martin Walker
- Neil Baldwin
- Semi-Precious Studios
- Steve Duckworth
- Todd Dennis (from Tommy Tallarico Studios)
- Tony Williams - Composer for Family Feud (GEN).