Before games had full epic soundtracks, you still got quality “intro tracks”, occasionally with a few other songs for whilst you’re playing.
Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe intro music (youtube link)
From the same Atari ST/Amiga era: Chaos Engine, Frontier Elite 2, Xenon 2 Megablast, Syndicate Wars
For newer stuff with “full soundtracks”, you can’t beat Stellaris OST (youtube link)
The “Fonline” engine fodev.net or fonline.ru was (almost) able to create a fully functional Fallout game, with zoom, higher resolution sprites or isometric 3D models, whilst retaining the look, feel and controls of the originals.
The main problem (from my perspective) was that it was designed as a “multiplayer-first” engine with real-time pew-pew-pew combat, and getting it to do anything singleplayer and turn-based needed quite a lot of work at the time - and engine updates weren’t often backwards compatible, and the documentation was often only in Russian. A lot of half-finished projects showed great promise, but then broke and fizzled out.
I think it’s still in development. Last time I looked, they were “refactoring” all the code (including fixing all the single-player stuff). It still holds promise for the future.
Good work, thank you :)