The Doctor Who Theme Song
The music in the game is based on the Doctor Who theme song. While the
music on the television show was almost uniformly cheesy,
the main theme itself is a science fiction classic. Although I don't
know the whole history, the unique sound of the instruments was achieved
by playing two or three old, beat-up instruments (one was a piano I
believe) and playing them backwards.
I re-recorded the song for purposes of the game and it therefore differs
somewhat from the original. The MIDI is
optimized for WaveTable soundcards (such as the SoundBlaster AWE). It may
sound terrible on different hardware - your mileage will vary.
The MIDI palette is generally disappointing on any
hardware, but one does what one can.
A very different (and more accomplished) interpretation can be found at
http://www.armory.com/~keeper/midi.html.
The music should start automatically if you have the Crescendo plug-in
installed correctly. The Crescendo plug-in can be downloaded from LiveUpdate.
If you have a use for the MIDI, please feel free to use it on your web
page. I would be very interested to hear comments on the music, which
may be sent to ethan@KoobiFora.com.
How It Is Done
Daleks! uses multiple frames to implement its soundtrack, as Sun's new Java Media API is not
yet widely supported.
This is a work-around until Java gets better and more common multimedia abilities. When
the user toggles music on (with the 
button), the
applet loads an HTML file in the bottom frame containing the
embedding tags for the Crescendo plug-in.
Netscape Navigator sometimes appears to
have serious difficulties with this implementation
but I have yet to see Microsoft Internet Explorer
crash over this. If
worse comes to worst, players can leave the soundtrack off and play
the game normally.
Back to the
Game.