Reviews
Game
Pirates! Gold is an updated version of Sid Meier's Pirates! The game features much of the same excitement and thrills of the earlier game, but with better graphics and sound. You are the captain of a ship and it is up to you to manage and maintain your vessel and crew. The game is very open allowing you to lead a respectable life as a sailor, become a blood thirsty pirate, seek buried treasure, or settle down and get married.
Pirates! Gold was programmed before 16-bit color was common to Windows and it won't run perfectly in Windows 32/NT versions. It demands 16 or 256 bit color, which can be done by making a shortcut of the program and setting its program compatibility to "Run in 256 mode". However, even with this fix you can still have display issues.
Music
Because this Windows version uses General MIDI for music, the quality isn't as good as the DOS version. However, even with the weakened sound, the tunes are still quite nice. You can hear some old salty sea shanties like Drunken Sailor, and several new ones as well. Unfortunately, the music wasn't engineered very well and the volume abruptly changes between songs making it rather annoying to barely hear one song, only to blow your speakers with the next. This poor mixing can be noticed even right in the middle of certain tunes.
Ripping
The music is just in type 1 MIDI format located in the MIDI folder. It was recorded using Winamp. The full names were extrapolated from the abbreviated MIDI file names.
Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates%21_Gold
| 
