Colonization Bonus Episode Video – FreeCol HD Tour

This bonus video showcases in HD the amazing FreeCol fan game based on Sid Meier’s Colonization. This is the first episode in a special bonus series where I play Civilization and Colonization fan games. FreeCol is fully playable, support modern HD resolutions & multiplayer, is very fun to play and is still worked on today. Thanks to 3rd party modders it also supports more maps (Americas, Australia, Africa, Asia, full world etc), more nations (allowing huge 8, 12 or 16 nation super games), and more natives. This fan game video series is a bonus sub series to my main how to play classic Civ and Col genre games in HD video series. To see how I was able to play the original Sid Meier’s Colonization in HD see my main tour video here: https://youtu.be/JoAYn5LGq60?list=PLZqnaGtTZxFbq3F5R6lqzyVvYzg9tRBPY

VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSfj_G4kA9g&list=PLZqnaGtTZxFbq3F5R6lqzyVvYzg9tRBPY

CONTENTS:
00:00 Video Series Introduction
00:49 FreeCol Tour Introduction
02:53 Colonization today & it’s legacy via other games!
 – 02:54 Classic Colonization in HD  (Main Ep Preview)
 – 03:17 Colonization fan communities
 – 03:33 Civ 4 Colonization sequel & it’s mods (Future Ep Preview)
 – 03:57 How FreeCol bridges the gap between Col & Civ4Col
 – 04:18 Treasure Fleet fan game (Bonus Ep Preview)
 – 04:31 FreeMars Scifi Colonization (Bonus Ep Preview)
 – 04:52 Colonization mods for Civilization games (Bonus Ep Preview)
 – 05:11 My attempts to play as natives (Bonus Ep Preview)
05:33 Starting and customizing a new FreeCol Game
 – 05:51 FreeCol 3rd party mods
 – 06:23 FreeCol is VERY customizable
 – 06:57 More playable nations mod for supersized Col games!
 – 08:24 Huge custom maps & random map generator
 – 09:26 More natives mod
 – 09:44 Final disclaimers
 – 10:16 Oh wait.. there’s MORE customization!
10:31 New FreeCol game begins!
15:05 Mid game example tour
18:26 FreeCol Map Editor and Super Earth map!
22:58 Late game declaration example & advisors tour
33:28 End game example tour (with REF combat)
35:38 Final thoughts & future video series plans

Converting Midi to high quality MP3 music without Solmire.com

To most people Midi music files are a long forgotten music format from a bygone era of 90s gaming and the internet. However surprisingly to this day there are still quite a lot of midi hosting websites and people creating them. I still quite like them as there’s just something about finding the best quality approximation of the real song in that tiny little file size that takes up next to no space. I quite like using them on my website Blake’s Sanctum and also on my Youtube channel as its a great way to circumvent music copyright issues haha! I’ve also been using them in my Sid Meier’s Civilization 2 mods as it’s a great way to include custom music in them without massively increasing the download size.

Back in the 90s most of us rocked Soundblaster cards or cheaper equivalents and dreamed of having one of those Roland MT32, AWE32 or General Midi cards that rich people owned as it completely transformed midi music we’d hear in our cheap soundcards into something amazing and more realistic. Thankfully in more recent decades those amazing effects could be recreated using modern day Midi to MP3 converter sites with powerful Soundfont options. The best was a site known as Solmire and I used it for many years however sadly the website disappeared in 2021 and has not returned. There’s a webarchive copy of the site but sadly it doesn’t work as it needs a fully functioning webserver instead of a frozen read only copy. I was pretty devo as all attempts to convert midis on other websites and using downloaded apps did not net music results anywhere near as good.

However thankfully with some help I recently finally figured out how to perfectly replicate the Solmire experience! First you need the free opensource and easy to use Midi to MP3 converter program called Keppy’s Midi Converter. Alone it’ll do an ‘okayish’ job but it really needs soundfonts. Thankfully the webarchive copy of Solmire showed me that their default soundfont they used was one called SGM V2.01. It took some hunting but I was able to find a copy of SGM V2.01 soundfont preserved on internet archive. There are many other good soundfonts out there which are backed up on Internet Archive too that people like (ie I know someone who swears by MagicSFver2) and I suspect I’d love too if I had the time to test them all, but personally I’m happy with SGM V2.01 as that was Solmire’s preferred choice!

To get it working simply install Keppy’s Midi Converter, place the downloaded soundfont file in a location of your choice, start the converter, go to ‘Actions’ menu and select ‘Open Soundfonts/VTS manager’, click ‘Import Soundfonts’, go to where you put the soundfont file and load it in and hit OK, go to ‘Actions’ menu again and select ‘Import MIDIs’, find and load in your favourite old midi file from back in the day and it will appear in the job list, go to ‘Actions’ menu again and select ‘render to MP3’ and select where you want the file outputted and the conversion process will being. Go play the outputted file and hear the difference between that and your original midi file! It should be pointed out that these days the free and popular VLC Media Player supports Midi soundfonts as well so you can skip the whole conversion process and just use that if you wish too!

Civilization 1 Japanese Playstation 1 Port – English Translation Patch Released!

A talented fellow named riderr3 has successfully managed to partially translate the rather cool ASMIK Japanese Playstation port of Sid Meier’s Civilization 1 into English and released a patch. This is very cool as obviously I did a tour video on this version a while back and had to use a phone camera translator app to have any idea of what was going on, but now that is no longer needed! For the uninitiated the PS1 port of Civ1 is a special unique isometric 2.5D almost ‘Civ2 like’ looking version of Civ1 filled with FMV and new graphics that was never released outside of Japan. I imported a near mint condition physical copy of it from Japan a few years back and muck around with it occasionally so I’m very happy there’s an English patch for it now! I’ve tried to message riderr3 to see if he could be tempted into doing a translation patch for the similarly rare and unique ASMIK Japanese port of Microprose’s Master of Magic called Civizard (which I did a partial picture translation of at GameFAQs) but sadly didn’t hear back from him of course as that would be too good to be true lol!

Here’s the patch and links to tools for applying it:
https://www.romhacking.net/translations/5677/

Here’s some screenshots of his English patch in action (normally all this text is in Japanese):

Here’s the video I did a while back on the SNES and PS1 ports:
youtu.be/xZ9pNNOsr2A?list=PLZqnaGtTZxFbq3F5R6lqzyVvYzg9tRBPY

Heroes of Might & Magic 3: Horn of the Abyss Addon v1.7 with Factory faction released!

What a nice way to bring in the new year! The team behind the popular Horn of the Abyss addon for Heroes of Might & Magic 3 have just put out their biggest release yet! The mod already contained the cool pirate Cove faction but now they’ve added a new steampunk Factory faction and a new campaign even with story cutscenes! But if that’s not enough they’ve managed to add airships into the game and even got legendary Heroes of Might & Magic series musician Paul Romero to help them finish the new music tracks originally started by Docent Picolan who sadly passed away.

More info: https://heroes3wog.net/horn-of-the-abyss-v1-7-with-factory-was-released-full-changelog/

Download: https://h3hota.com/en/download

Towns:

Trailer: