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Author Topic: Zone 66 music conversion help  (Read 21674 times)

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Saga Musix

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Re: Zone 66 music conversion help
« Reply #10 on: August 21, 2014, 02:09:19 »

Great job! I've long been waiting for hearing these tunes in a tracker. ;D

The drum loop in mg3gmuz.s3m is really badly looped, though, are you sure you got the tempo right? I never played the GUS version (well, and to be honest, I mostly played the first level in the SB version anyway... ;D), but I'd assume that it didn't sound like that.
« Last Edit: August 21, 2014, 02:17:11 by Saga Musix »
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Malvineous

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Re: Zone 66 music conversion help
« Reply #11 on: August 21, 2014, 03:04:48 »

Thanks!  Glad you like them :-)

I never played beyond the first level in the SB version either, but I did go through a year or so ago and record all the songs from the game itself, and listening to the recording of MG3 and the S3M of it, I can't hear any difference.  The drum loop is out of rhythm even in the game itself.

If you or anyone wants to verify this, make a copy of the game and rename MG3GMUZ.Z66 to M03GMUZ.Z66 and start the game with the /g parameter.  It will load GUS music and play the MG3 song on the main menu (you might need to go into the Options menu so you can listen for long enough without the demo kicking in.)  DOSBox has a GUS enabled by default so if you disable EMS+XMS in the DOSBox config the game will run fine in there.

I'm pretty confident the tempo is right based on the drum loop in M01.  +/- 1BPM and it doesn't sound quite the same as the game.
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Jay

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Re: Zone 66 music conversion help
« Reply #12 on: August 22, 2014, 06:16:27 »

Very cool! Will listen on my system and give you some feedback on the conversion soon.

Could you do some of their lesser known demos with the same system? E.g. Blackglass 1 & 2 ? I've actually never been able to get the music for those working natively, they hate my AWE64.
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Saga Musix

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Re: Zone 66 music conversion help
« Reply #13 on: August 22, 2014, 12:22:33 »

It might also be a simple "computer too fast" issue and not a soundcard issue. This problem exists with quite a few old demos where the soundblaster detection routine runs too fast for the card to catch up (as discussed on page 1, soundblasters are sloooow). I remember having this issue with Zone 66 when having too many cycles configured in DOSBox, at least.
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Malvineous

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Re: Zone 66 music conversion help
« Reply #14 on: August 25, 2014, 01:29:16 »

Oh wow I had no idea they used this format with other demos too!  I downloaded Blackglass 2 and it comes with the .670 files already extracted, and they play fine straight away!

I'll work my way through the list here and see what I can find, but if there are any others that use this music format let me know!

I'll convert everything I can find and post a link here when I'm done.
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Malvineous

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Re: Zone 66 music conversion help
« Reply #15 on: August 26, 2014, 03:53:32 »

Here's what I've found, the list is in chronological order starting with the earliest:

The Sound Barrier: Too old
Composer 669: N/A
RQ Demo 0: Not checked, screenshot suggests music is a ripped .mod
Black Glass: Uses an early incompatible version of CDFM
Yet Another Renaissance Demo: Uses same early version of CDFM
Black Glass 2: Two CDFM songs, included in link below
Amnesia Music Player: N/A
Amnesia: Files already posted
Renaissance 93: No music
Daretro: One SB CDFM song, included below.  Also has a GUS song but the samples aren't stored with it like in Zone 66.  Maybe it shares the SB samples?  The length fields for each sample are certainly similar.
Muzik File: Three SB CDFM songs, included below. (I recognise some of the samples in these songs from the Zone 66 music)
DoWhackaDo (with SPD): .exe is compressed, can't find any songs in DOSBox memory dump
Multitracker Module Editor: N/A
nothing on: Music files seem to be in a variant of .mtm, ModPlug accepts them but doesn't play them properly
Epidemic (with iCE): Music files are all .s3m, any ripper can extract these

Here are the original CDFM songs plus conversions to S3M: renaissance-cdfm.zip

If anyone is interested I have starting writing a ripping utility as I couldn't find a good one that works under Linux, and I miss the old "Ripper 5" from my DOS days.  It's nowhere near as functional as Ripper 5 was, however it does support ripping CDFM files :-)  In a homage to Ripper 5, I have called it Ripper6 and the code is up on github.
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Saga Musix

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Re: Zone 66 music conversion help
« Reply #16 on: August 26, 2014, 14:41:03 »

Great job! :)
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Jay

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Re: Zone 66 music conversion help
« Reply #17 on: August 26, 2014, 15:08:37 »

Cool, nice work! Yeah Ripper5 was amazing, I still use it. It's in the system path on my DOS machine for quick rippery. 8) A version for modern Linux systems would be boss, following this with interest!

DoWhackaDo was an ordinary 4 channel mod (it's this one), which I suspect was made on PC as it's not quite Protracker/Amiga compatible (some notes are out of range for Paula, etc.) I made a 'fixed' version that plays nice with Hoffman's PT-1210 dj app, but that's getting off topic...
« Last Edit: August 26, 2014, 15:14:55 by Jay »
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