DX-Ball 2 - Music

Music

The music in DX-Ball 2 was written by Eric Gieseke, also known as SideWinder. The complete soundtrack contains 15 songs in a melodic euro-techno style, with various branches and influences ranging from hardcore, techno, breakbeat, jazz, house, and rock. Initially, the game came bundled with only 4 tracks, encompassing three title screen songs and a high score song. However, with the release of DX-Ball 2 version 1.2, support was added for in-game music. While this allowed for the three title screen songs to be played back in-game, a separate Music Pack was simultaneously made available for download, adding 11 new songs to the game. Notably, though, the Music Pack was discontinued as of version 1.3.2, as the 11 in-game songs are now included with the basic installation.

The in-game songs are played in a random order per game, and the player can easily skip between tracks or turn the music off by pressing F5; the first press unloading the music, and the next press loading a new song. DX-Ball 2 also permits the in-game music to be customized, by adding or removing files from the InGameMods subdirectory. However, the game will only support module files of the .mod, .xm and .s3m formats. Also, the modules may use up to 24 channels, but the game will initially only allow up to 8 channels. In order to increase this value, it must be changed from the game's advanced configurations file (see Kid-Mode and Rehab Mode). Incidentally, as a related option under the advanced configurations, the playback rate of all sound is set to 22 kHz by default, and may be increased to 44,1 kHz for improved sound quality.