Driller Explains: Why Recent Songs for the Emiverse Have Not Been PC-98 Touhou-style Originals

In the past, back when Studio Emiko was known as Akira Akagi Games, the music composed for her games were mostly FamiTracker and PC-98 originals. Nowadays, it’s been gone. Why has this happened?

Emiko Hosokawa is requesting that the songs for the Emiverse be exported to MIDI so that the Touhou Project instrumentation could be used. FamiTracker and BambooTracker, the programs used to write those songs, do not have MIDI export. OpenMPT has MIDI export, and the only songs that we could do are SNES and AdLib/SoundBlaster originals.

The PC-98 Touhou flavor is what helps kickstart its atmosphere. It has since faded away starting in 2022. Driller is still composing PC-98 originals in his own time, taking inspiration from the world around him, and recent world events.

Drillimation could revive PC-98 originals for the Emiverse if BambooTracker gets MIDI export, but the only way to do so at the moment is to export the songs to VGM format and convert it to MIDI, and fix all the little details that went wrong during the conversion process. That’s what happened during the development of the Touhou 5: Mystic Square NES Demake.

Drillimation’s current standards for composing AdLib/SoundBlaster originals is using eight OPL2 channels, with four extra coming from the Game Boy hardware, giving the illusion of a Game Boy Advance game.