Neil Baldwin
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Neil Baldwin is an English composer and sound designer. He co-founded the game development studio Eurocom, and as a result, was their primary composer. He did music and sound design for the company all the way up until 2006.
Baldwin is perhaps best known for his work on the NES, having one of the more superior-quality sound engines. Some of his most popular works include James Bond Jr., Ferrari Grand Prix Challenge, and The Jungle Book.
As the years progressed, more composers started joining Eurocom, and as a result, Neil received less and less composition credits, and was usually credited as an audio director. Neil explained that he stepped down from composition when Steve Duckworth joined, as it allowed him to focus on sound programming, and Duckworth was able to create good music fast.
After leaving the games industry, his passion for 8-bit video game music remained. He created several pieces of retro music software. Baldwin created a music tracker program that emulates the NES sound chip called Ninjuu. Baldwin also made NTRQ, which is a tracker that runs on a real NES. He also made Pulsar, which runs at a whopping 200Hz, which is five times faster than the NES processor ran in Baldwin's native England. Baldwin also wrote the music for a game called 'Erik the Viking' which was not released, but from keeping his source code over the years, he managed to convert his source code into an NSF.
Contents
Audio Development
Commodore 64
Baldwin programmed his own music driver.
NES
Baldwin developed a sound driver with Tim Rogers and entered the music in 6502 assembly code.
According to Baldwin, the driver does not support a global tempo, so he basically had to enter the tempo for each note again. For James Bond Jr., he said he felt the music sounded a little too fast, but couldn't change it easily enough due to this fact.
The game Ferrari Grand Prix Challenge uses a song from James Bond Jr. Baldwin explained that he reused the song because he was fond of it and was in a rush, in addition to not being paid very well for working on the game.
Since Baldwin lives in England, a country that uses the PAL format, it is likely his music is intended for the PAL NES RP2A07 as opposed to the NTSC version's 2A03.
Baldwin still has the source code to the games he worked on, but wishes not to release them.
SNES
In an interview with Original Sound Version (see link below), Baldwin explained working on the SNES:
Baldwin programmed a piece of software for the SNES that was compatible with MIDI. His sound engine was custom-programmed, and is one of the few sound engines that is not based on Kankichi-kun.
Nintendo 64
According to his interview, Baldwin initially uses Software Creations' N64 Sound Tools. On rest of his works, he uses MusyX audio tools, which developed by Factor 5.
Gameography
Picture Gallery
LinkedIn.
Unknown source.
Links
- marmotaudio.co.uk - Company website.
- web.archive.org/web/20191221132614/http://dutycyclegenerator.com/ - Personal website.
- linkedin.com/in/neil-baldwin-66a32370/ - LinkedIn.
- twitter.com/dutycyclegen - Twitter.
- youtube.com/user/dutycyclegenerator - YouTube.
- youtube.com/@neilbaldwin7701 - Youtube.
