Tim & Geoff Follin's development disk archive
Image: kevedwardsretro

The music development disk archive of the legendary British video game composers Tim & Geoff Follin has been preserved online by Kevin Edwards, one of their former Software Creations colleagues.

According to the GitHub description, the collection covers the period 1987 onwards (from when the pair were working at Software Creations) and was initially stored on 13 Tatung Einstein 3" floppy disks.

These disks were kept by Tim Follin over the years and were first donated to another Software Creations alum Dean Belfield (@breakintoprog) a few years ago, who dutifully saved what he could and uploaded it to GitHub. Since then, however, Belfield decided to see whether more could be recovered and passed these disks over to Edwards, who has used a combination of custom hardware and software to archive the collection again from scratch, retrieving more of the lost and missing data in the process.

The collection contains a treasure trove of music and SFX source files, for platforms such as the C64, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC, including Tim Follin's work on the microcomputer versions of games like Bionic Commando, Ghouls 'n Ghosts, Peter Pack Rat, LED Storm, Aigina's Prophecy, Chesterfield, Black Lamp, Raw Recruit, and more. There are also several versions of the Music Driver program that Software Creations' audio programmer Ste Ruddy created for various platforms, which Tim and Geoff used to make their music back in the day.

You can peruse the files here. Just as a warning, though, the names of the source files don't exactly correspond to the music within them.

In addition to this, Edwards has also acknowledged that the collection includes a mixture of final, work-in-progress, and possibly unreleased/unfinished material, but he isn't familiar enough with the original pieces to sort them into separate categories himself.

[source github.com, via x.com]