SimTunes
After the cancellation of Sound Fantasy, Maxis got familiar with the "Music Insects" installation at the San Francisco's Exploratorium a few years later, and got interested to develop a Windows PC version of it. Toshio Iwai and Maxis would then work together to make SimTunes for Windows PCs in 1996.
The result is a full reimplementation of Music Insects, based from Sound Fantasy's Pix Quartet version with additional features and improvements, such as the ability to use more musical scales as color palettes, more choices of instruments, more ways to handle the movements of Bugz such as ignoring the color and just draw functions, as well setting up starting positions and teleportations. It is the definitive version of Music Insects.
Some of the demo contents from Sound Fantasy would be seen in the Gallery of SimTunes, such as "Bird in the Dark," and some of the people who worked on the original game would also appear in the Special Thanks, such as Benimaru Itoh who also made pictures for the Gallery. Unfortunately however, Beat Hopper, Ice Sweeper and Star Fly from Sound Fantasy would not be seen in this software, only the equivalent of Pix Quartet.
The minimum required technical specifications required:
- CPU: Intel i486 DX2 (66 MHz or faster)
- RAM: 8 MB or more
- OS: Windows 3.1, 95 or more recent
- CD-ROM Drive Speed: 2X or more
- Video Resolution: 640x480
- Devices required: Mouse
Playing SimTunes on current PCs might result in bugs, so feel free to read through the PCGamingWiki page for troubleshooting problems for current systems, or handle the software through either a Virtual Machine or a PC emulator such as PCem, which is recommended.
Download SimTunes (USA Version) (Archive.org)
Télécharger SimMusik (Version Française) (Archive.org)
