Hi all,
I'm working on a conversion utility for the music in the DOS game
Zone 66. I have successfully reverse engineered the file format (
documented here) and converted it to ScreamTracker S3M format. (I selected this format because it was one of the few that support both sampled and Adlib instruments.)
However, there are still a few unknowns and I'm wondering whether anyone here with a bit of tracking experience can offer some suggestions, as the format seems to share a lot of things with its contemporaries.
- The sampled instruments have their centre frequency as 33075Hz. This is a number I guessed by listening, but it seems a bit high to me for a song from the early 90s. The notes seem to be played in very low octaves, so I am wondering whether the song needs to be transposed and the frequency lowered. Some of the pitches don't quite match what the game sounds like, but I've been listening to both correct and incorrect versions of the songs for so long now I can't really tell any more which is right and which isn't...!
- The "speed" is the only figure copied directly from the source file. To play at the correct rate, the "tempo" has to be set to 144 or so. This is another magic number which I came up with by twiddling until the drum loop in the title sequence looped fairly smoothly. Is there something special about a tempo of 144? (0x90) Is there a well known tempo value close to this that is probably more correct?
- Has anyone ever created a song that uses both Adlib and sampled instruments? When I play these files in ScreamTracker the Adlib notes seem to play too soon relative to the sampled ones, but when I use SchismTracker they are fine. But then SchismTracker seems to mangle some Adlib notes so I'm not sure. Just looking for feedback as to whether there are any known issues with trackers/players in this respect.
- Some of the Adlib notes seem to play very quietly compared to the sampled ones, but this only seems to affect ScreamTracker. SchismTracker seems ok. Not sure which way is better...
If you'd like to take a look at the files, here are
z66title2.s3m and
z66ep1v2.s3m. If you're not familiar with the game, some recordings I made are
available in Ogg Vorbis at VGMPF (the first two tracks - 101 Theme and 102 Foreign Shores - match the .s3m files.)
Any feedback would be much appreciated!