Game:

The Secret of Monkey Island (1990)

Duration: 1:40

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The title screen music from The Secret of Monkey Island, for IBM-PC compatibles. This is the OPL2 soundtrack as played on Ad-Lib and Sound Blaster sound cards.

The original music is recorded in hardware-agnostic MIDI format. Many MIDI players use a technique called "dynamic channel allocation". This lets the player choose which channel is most appropriate for playing a specific MIDI note. The MIDI data does not define which OPL2 channel a note should be played in (in fact, it does not know anything about sound chips), so in order to avoid notes being cut off by another note, whenever a new note needs to be played, the music player checks each OPL2 channel to see which is least busy playing a note (or in the worst case, closest to fading out), and uses it to play the new note. This results in instruments jumping around channels, whichever is most available at the time. So if you're thinking of commenting "wait, which channel is playing which instrument? Looks like they're jumping all over the place", there you have your answer.

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