Bio Menace is a 1993 game developed by Apogee Software (a.k.a. 3D Realms, the developers of Duke Nukem 3-D).  This was one of the earliest games I played when we got a computer back in 1999, one that I have fond memories of playing, and one thing I really liked about it was the music (composed by Bobby Prince, the same guy who did the music for Doom and the Commander Keen games).  I had tried many times to download the music in MIDI or some other format, but it just wasn't available anywhere.

On Sunday I was randomly searching for this stuff again and I came across some very useful links.  I managed to get the soundtrack of the game, though it was not so straightforward.  I'll describe the steps I took to finally get it to work here, but don't let that scare you, I've also included a list of essential links below, which should allow you to easily get and listen to the music yourself, and also get and play the game itself.

The starting point was a post at the 3D Realms Forums, which talked about extracting the music from the company's older games (published when they were still Apogee Software), which led me to another post on a Commander Keen-related forum.  Here, someone had very helpfully extracted out 16 music tracks from the game and uploaded them as a neat ZIP file which was just 50 KB in size!  The only problem was that the music was in IMF format (music intended to be played on an Adlib sound card) and couldn't be played directly.  A plugin for Winamp was needed, that enabled it to play back IMF files, and such a plugin was called Adplug.  Unfortunately, the official site for Adplug apparently does not host binaries, and had only source code available!  Fortunately, there was a separate site with a compiled binary available, which I downloaded.  I dropped this into my Winamp Plugins folder, and I was finally able to listen to the songs from Bio Menace!

By the way, the entire game was released as freeware a couple of years ago.  However, it being a DOS game, would not run properly on modern computers.  You would need to play it with the DOSBox emulator.

As promised, all links below, categorised for your easy reference —

Downloading and Playing the Music

• Go to the second post on this page and download the file biomusic.zip.
• Next, go here, and download the file in_adlib-1.8.zip.  It contains a file called in_adlib.dll, which you just need to drop in your Winamp Plugins folder (for me this is in C:\Program Files\Winamp\Plugins).
• Now you can open those IMF files with Winamp and listen to the music!

Downloading and Playing the Game

• Go to the Official Bio Menace Page, and download the file called bmfreew.zip (by the way, the full game, with three episodes, is just a 1.5 MB download, man, how much things have changed since then!).  Install it anywhere you like, preferably in a folder with other DOS games (I have mine in C:\Games\DOS\Bmenace).
• Download the latest version of DOSBox and install that too.  Run DOSBox and within it, mount the relevant folder (I usually do this: mount x: c:\games\dos).  Then at the relevant prompt, navigate to the Bio Menace folder and run the game (for me this would be an x: first, followed by cd bmenace and then bmenace1 or bmenace2 or bmenace3 depending on which episode I want to play)!

Other Informational Links

• The post on the 3D Realms Forums
• Wikipedia entries: Bio Menace, IMF format, Bobby Prince
• Adplug Sourceforge Project Page
• Bobby Prince website

One can do quite a bit of exploring from those pages, enjoy.  Personally this was a lot of nostalgia too for me, I have a large number of game-related (a lot of Doom-related) MIDIs on my cellphone, and was listening to many tracks on the way to work this morning.