Skip to content

Valley Bell's MIDI converters

game music -> mid

Technical discussion which is not directly related to VGM files. Talk about Hardware and Software.

Moderator: Staff

  • User avatar
  • ValleyBell Offline
  • Posts: 4768
  • Joined: 2011-12-01, 20:20:07
  • Location: Germany

Valley Bell's MIDI converters

Post by ValleyBell »

EDIT: I made a GitHub repository that contains the source code to all tools I ever wrote.

During the past year, I wrote various converters that convert game music formats to MIDI.
They're listed in chronological order, source code is included.

The first one is seq2mid for PSFs.
.seq files are mostly MIDIs, but the tool makes you able to remap the instruments and fix a few things where SEQs behave differently from MIDIs.
Here are some example files. You'll need to look at the .ini-files, because I didn't document the instrument mapping format. (small note: columns are seperated by tabs, only the first number in a column is read)
This is the oldest one of the tools. The first version of it dates back to 2009 and was written in Visual Basic 6.
Note: You need to extract the SEQ and INS files manually from PSFs or the game itself. (Hint: The SEQ header starts with "pQES", and INS header with "pBAV".)

In 2010 I also worked on an akao2mid tool, but I'd need to work on it a bit before releasing it. Support for AKAO v1 (Final Fantasy 7) is pretty complete, AKAO v2 (FF8/9, Chrono Cross) needs some work.

Then we have smps2mid [direct link] (SMPS is used e.g. in Sonic games, see also the MD Sound Engine List)
and de2mid [direct link] (Data East's sound engine is used by many Chinese pirates), both written in 2011.
There's also [pack] Lem3DMid which I wrote in VB6 in early 2011 (it ran in the IDE only though) and ported it to C in 2012.

And finally, in 2012 I wrote:
  • a small mod of de2mid to convert Sonic Spinball SMS songs to mid (I plan to add that to smps2mid)
  • ffmq2mid (for the music format used by Square RPGs), this also need some work (but less than akao2mid) before I can release it
  • sbm52mid (for Super Bomberman 5 SPCs, requested by Varion)
    Note: does just a raw conversion with lots of debug output
  • top2mid (works also with Star Ocean) because I love SFC Tales of Phantasia's music
    Note: The tool can remap instruments, but right now I've only hardcoded some of them. If anyone wants to makes an SPC->GM instrument list for ToP and SO I'll add instrument mapping support similar to seq2mid's.
  • and gems2mid (can also convert instruments and dump DAC sounds). I already ripped some data from GEMS games.
Enjoy!

EDIT 2013-01-25: Added note about Sonic Spinball SMS tool.
EDIT 2013-04-24: Added link for Lem3DMid.
EDIT 2017-12-09: Changed gems2mid link to most recent version.
  • User avatar
  • MaliceX Offline
  • Posts: 226
  • Joined: 2012-09-29, 11:45:48
  • Location: Australia
  • Contact:

Post by MaliceX »

:shock:
-dj.tuBIG/MaliceX
  • User avatar
  • ValleyBell Offline
  • Posts: 4768
  • Joined: 2011-12-01, 20:20:07
  • Location: Germany

Post by ValleyBell »

I thought I'll just post my today's mini-project: the GEMS Scanner
It searches through ROMs for the GEMS driver and its data, displays its offsets and extracts them.

This works pretty well with most of the games I tested, though some games like Wacky Worlds don't work, because they use huge pointer tables at the beginning of the ROM.
And these are read via 3 or 4 nested subroutines and I won't bother doing tracing all that.

Also, it may not always find all the music. Garfield: Caught in the Act has 2 sets of music, for example, but the loading code is a bit different, so it doesn't find it.
  • Cris Offline
  • Posts: 19
  • Joined: 2013-07-16, 20:14:22

Post by Cris »

I received an error:Gems Loader Not Found . What is this.
  • User avatar
  • ValleyBell Offline
  • Posts: 4768
  • Joined: 2011-12-01, 20:20:07
  • Location: Germany

Post by ValleyBell »

It's a tool that extracts the sound driver and all related data from MegaDrive games.
It is for all games that use the GEMS sound driver. (Use this list to look up which games should work.)
  • Cris Offline
  • Posts: 19
  • Joined: 2013-07-16, 20:14:22

Post by Cris »

I was confused, The Lion King is not done in GEMS.But ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron not work.
Last edited by Cris on 2013-08-19, 2:25:39, edited 1 time in total.
  • User avatar
  • MaliceX Offline
  • Posts: 226
  • Joined: 2012-09-29, 11:45:48
  • Location: Australia
  • Contact:

Post by MaliceX »

ValleyBell, did you ever share your converter for dumping music from the megadrive wolfteam games?
-dj.tuBIG/MaliceX
  • User avatar
  • ValleyBell Offline
  • Posts: 4768
  • Joined: 2011-12-01, 20:20:07
  • Location: Germany

Post by ValleyBell »

I think I only posted links on the IRC channel.
I also have a few other converters that I should share someday, but I wanted to add a few features before the release. (And I keep forgetting about the tools.)

Post by FlyingGrayson »

Any chance of releasing AKAO2mid or ffmq2mid? desperately searching for a way to get accurate FFVII midis
  • kirishima Offline
  • Posts: 82
  • Joined: 2015-06-18, 22:26:41

Post by kirishima »

I'm kind of interested in the akao2mid tool as well just to see if it supports Parasite Eve.
  • User avatar
  • ValleyBell Offline
  • Posts: 4768
  • Joined: 2011-12-01, 20:20:07
  • Location: Germany

Post by ValleyBell »

After a request by FlyingGrayson (who wanted akao2mid for a personal project) I decided to patch it up to get it into a sort-of-working state. I guess I should post the result here as well.

In other news, I tried to collect pretty much all MIDI converters I did during the past years and made a GitHub repo for them.
It contains the source for a 31 tools in total. Not all of them are really useable, but I some of them might be quite interesting.
  • User avatar
  • ValleyBell Offline
  • Posts: 4768
  • Joined: 2011-12-01, 20:20:07
  • Location: Germany

Post by ValleyBell »

I guess it's a good idea to post some tools that I worked on (sort of) recently.
  • wtmd2mid - Wolf Team MegaDrive -> MIDI converter (also works with raw decompressed X68000 FM/PCM songs)
  • top2mid - Tales of Phantasia/Star Ocean SPC to MIDI converter
  • twinkle2mid - PC-98 Twinkle Soft -> MIDI converter (only tested with Bunretsu Shugo Shin Twinkle Star so far)
  • twinkle_dec - PC-98 Twinkle Soft Decompressor (unpacks the game archives)
  • fmp2mid - F.M.P -> MIDI converter (tested with V.G. 1/2, Briganty, might throw "unknown command" errors on other games)
  • x68k_sps_dec - X68000 S.P.S. Archive Unpacker (tested with Daimakaimura, Street Fighter II: CE and Super Street Fighter II: TNC)

Post by MixerProductions »

Is there any chance we could get a tool for Don Veca's EA games?

Road Rash 3 is a great soundtrack but the instruments change on the fly which renders the VGM2MID export almost unusable.
  • kingcandy Offline
  • Posts: 51
  • Joined: 2019-04-13, 15:38:34

Post by kingcandy »

as soon as you released the x68000 sps unpacker, I almost had a heart attack! I've been kicking and screaming like a tottler for a way to get the midis out of ssf2x68!
also, also plan on doing a program to extract ssg/ay8910 instruments from vgm files and spit them out as bambootracker instruments?
be a hero and stop coppa now!
http://chng.it/DNc2L8LvLJ
  • User avatar
  • ValleyBell Offline
  • Posts: 4768
  • Joined: 2011-12-01, 20:20:07
  • Location: Germany

Post by ValleyBell »

MixerProductions wrote:Is there any chance we could get a tool for Don Veca's EA games?
I don't have a tool for the EA/Don Veca driver planned right now.
But I had a look and the format and it is similar to EA/Steve Hayes. There are some differences that make it incompatible with the EA/SH converter.
It being a MIDI-based format would make it easy to write a converter though.
kingcandy wrote:also, also plan on doing a program to extract ssg/ay8910 instruments from vgm files and spit them out as bambootracker instruments?
Sorry, but I don't use BambooTracker.
Post Reply