I'm setting up a hi-fi system and I'm going to make a few CDs of some Data East soundtracks. Like some unofficial OSTs. Not all of them, just a handful I enjoy. This is before Sega decided to cut out Brian Schmidt's stereo BSMT2000 chip and reduce the sound down to one channel. His FM synth work from 1992 to 1995 is just incredible, with a unique soundfont that is distinctly "Data East Pinball" when you hear it.

When I get done, if anyone wants BIN/CUE file sets so they can burn their own let me know. I can share the Archive.org links.

Hook
Jurassic Park
Lethal Weapon 3
Star Wars
Tales from the Crypt

https://archive.org/details/hook-pinball-ost-audio-cd
Hook (resized).png
https://archive.org/details/jurassic-park-pinball-ost-audio-cd
Jurassic Park (resized).png
https://archive.org/details/lethal-weapon-3-pinball-ost-audio-cd

Lethal Weapon 3 (resized).png

What's a BSMT2000?

I find using the M1 arcade sound board emulator is best for this sort of thing. It basically steps through each music command and can also let you play hidden tracks.

Limewire, Windows Media Player, BitTorrent...

Oh I'm sure that was legal...

I didn't play that game so that's why it's not on the list.

I guess it does, but I haven't played it so it's not my list.

https://handwiki.org/wiki/Engineering:BSMT2000

It's going to take some time to dump, edit, and master WAV files from M1 to a CD for each game. So my list is going to be limited to those 5 games.

Found this in a 2004 interview:

Q: Describe how you produced the music for the games and what equipment you may have used.

A: Actually, I wrote music the old fashioned way—on music paper with pencil (and eraser). Then, I’d transcribe it by hand into computer text files that the pinball music system (or video game system) could read. When I started doing other work, I’d just use a simple keyboard controller (Ensoniq VFX) for working out compositions, but I’d generally have a ‘real’ keyboard player come in to lay down tracks. I’d do the bass parts, though

Q: How would you compare the Williams sound systems to that of other manufacturers such as Data East?

A: DCS was a great system, though it traded interactivity for production quality. I can argue both sides of this one.. whether it’s better to have higher (production) quality music, studio recorded, but not be as interactive with the game, or to have a lower production quality (i.e. on the fly synthesized music), but have it be a lot more interactive. So it was just two different approaches. I also liked that we could generally get more music into the games.. I think most DE pins had a good 25 minutes or so of music, by the time you add up all the timers, modes, etc.

Q: What does BSMT really stand for and were there any pinball sound breakthroughs with this system?

A:Ok.. It was “Brian Schmidt’s Mouse Trap”.. I forgot who said “invent a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door”. At the time it was (I think) the first arcade/pinball sound chip that did waveform playback instead of FM synthesis. A whopping 11 voices at 24kHz…woo hoo!

Hook OST is done:

https://archive.org/details/hook-pinball-ost-audio-cd

Seems legit...

_20231208_205316 (resized).JPG

Did it work? Older players may not read CD-Rs. But anything made after the mid-90s should.

Not exactly 65 million years in the making:

https://archive.org/details/jurassic-park-pinball-ost-audio-cd

I didn't test using ImgBurn, I mastered the files with Brasero on Linux Mint. Maybe ImgBurn doesn't like something about the cue sheet. It's standard.

What the heck... this has been an issue with Brasero for over a decade:

https://forum.daemon-tools.cc/forum/daemon-tools-support/technical-questions/23240-

I'll pull the bad cue sheets and replace "MOTOROLA" with "WAVE" then. Thanks for pointing that out.

https://captainrookie.com/cue-sheet-syntax/

BINARY – Intel binary file (least significant byte first)
MOTOROLA – Motorola binary file (most significant byte first)
AIFF – Audio AIFF file
WAVE – Audio WAVE file
MP3 – Audio MP3 file

Try burning it now. I did away with the ZIP files and just have the BIN and CUE files.

Brasero is utterly stupid when it comes to audio CDs. The worst. Now that I have fixed the cue sheet to specify the correct data type, it refuses to burn the image. The only way I can get it to work is to change WAVE back to MOTOROLA.

Because I'm burning CDs for myself. Feel free to mount and rip the tracks to FLAC files if you want.

https://archive.org/details/lethal-weapon-3-pinball-ost-audio-cd

Lethal Weapon 3 was a challenge because the Sweat pre-launch and main loop tracks were not accessible in the M1 emulator. This means I had to resort to using PinMAME. Visual Pinball does not run on Wine Staging on Linux due to a bug. And I didn't want to mess up my Wine installation changing versions. Also, using a Windows VM is not an option because Visual Pinball requires DirectX 9 for hardware acceleration. This meant I had to learn how to simulate blind switch inputs, reference the switch matrix, and memorize some row and column hotkeys. This was necessary to run the live game in real time, put 3 balls in the trough, and press start. This allowed me to record the pre-launch sequence, but there's another problem. There are 2 sound effects that need to be isolated, the cowbell used for the "jingle" sound effect during the skill shot and Danny Glover's laugh after the music selection screen times out.

The cowbell I was able to silence by editing lw3u17.dat in a hex editor and zeroing out the sample. Danny's laugh though I had to splice in another part of the pre-launch loop to replace entirely. That voice is part of the proprietary ADPCM format, and trying to silence that out manually in the ROM doesn't end well.

That covers the pre-launch. For Sweat's main loop, I had to launch and stick a ball. I ended up locking on one of the standup target switches to achieve this. After waiting for the ball searches to end, I was finally able to record the main loop and composite the pre-launch and main loop into a single track like the other 2 songs.

These workarounds took me a couple of days to figure out, but it was well worth the effort! On another note, I've updated the cue sheet to specify "BINARY" as the file type. I had no issues burning this with Brasero on Linux. If someone can test with ImgBurn on Windows to confirm that works for Lethal Weapon 3, that would be great. Then I'll update the cue sheets for the other games.
Lethal Weapon 3 (resized).png

Turns out it can be done in a single command, so I included ZIP files in each Internet Archive item with FLAC files inside.

Lasers in space, or at least in your CD player.

https://archive.org/details/star-wars-pinball-ost-audio-cd

Star Wars (resized).png