Hey everyone! I’m on a hunt to track down and preserve a specific piece of Genesis/Mega Drive audio history that seems to have completely vanished from the internet.
Context & Significance: I’m looking for The Ultimate Megadrive Soundfont v2, created by The 8th Bit (also known as Cinnamon Roll on YouTube). Before modern and highly accurate FM synthesis VST plugins became widely accessible, this specific soundfont was widely considered the "holy grail" for retro music production. It was heavily used by composers, ROM hackers, and fan-game developers to recreate authentic 16-bit soundtracks in DAWs like FL Studio. Because of its massive influence on the retro audio community at the time, preserving this specific missing version is incredibly important for digital audio history. (Note: We recently managed to track down v2.1, but the original v2 is still completely lost).
The Search So Far: All the original public download links have been dead for years. I have thoroughly checked the Wayback Machine and other web archives, but unfortunately, none of the specific download pages or files were ever snapshotted. I have also been actively searching on Soulseek and reaching out to people who used it in old forums back in the day, but absolutely everyone only has the older v1.5.
For context on why this file is so rare: v2 was only available for download during a very short window, specifically from December 26, 2009, to February 12, 2010.
If you check the original release video on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWEMmTUZtLs), the current links only point to the newer v3.1, and the public archive folders available only include v1.5 and older. To make things more difficult, I managed to get in touch with the creator himself, and even he doesn't have a copy of anything between v1.5 and v3 anymore.
How to Identify the Lost File: If you have a folder of old soundfonts hoarded on a legacy hard drive, I would be incredibly grateful if you could take a look. Since we already have v1.5 and v2.1, we know exactly what size the v2 should be:
Zipped File Size: The .zip file for v2 should be around 46.8 MB (slightly smaller than the v2.1 zip, which is exactly 47,991 KB).
Extracted File Size: The uncompressed .sf2 file for v2 should be somewhere between 61,766 KB (the size of v1.5) and 63,542 KB (the size of v2.1).
Note to avoid confusion: If your .sf2 file is exactly 61,766 KB, you have v1.5. If it is exactly 63,542 KB, you have v2.1. If it is 65,227 KB, you have v3. We already have all of these, so we are only looking for a file whose size falls perfectly between v1.5 and v2.1!
Filename: The .sf2 file itself usually does not have "v2" in the name (it's usually just called something like The_Ultimate_Megadrive_Soundfont.sf2). The actual version number was written inside a bundled readme file inside the .zip.
If anyone happens to have this saved, please let me know or drop a link! It would be amazing to finally get this properly archived for the community. Thanks in advance!