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Valley Bell's MIDI converters

game music -> mid

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

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  • Joey_Smith Offline
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  • Joined: 2022-09-04, 14:36:23

Post by Joey_Smith »

ValleyBell wrote:Works fine here.

It even works with autodetection:

EDIT: My GM.BLK file is 162 183 bytes, FM.BLK is 151 270 bytes. I extracted them from "Super Street Fighter II - The New Challengers.hdf".
Got it working and extracted 63 midis, Thanks for the help :D
  • Wizil Offline
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  • Joined: 2022-10-03, 5:08:12

Post by Wizil »

Learning as I go and I would consider myself a noob on this stuff (bare with me :) )
@ Valley Bell I have a few questions below if you dont mind (see below).
@Joey_Smith- are you able to share what you did to correct the issue. I am seemingly having the same issue you had (where I run the executable and it flashes up the text below but does not list any of the .mid files. It just stops after "Archive Format: BLK" It may be helpful to me if you share your fix.

@ Valley Bell-- Just checking. Am I supposed to put the executable (x68k_sps_dec.exe and the other 2 files) in the same directory as the .hdf game file??
For example, I put the x68k_sps_dec.exe file in the same folder as the Super Street fighter 2.hdf (I am not sure if that is correct but I dont know how the unpacker knows what files to look at otherwise). Then I am trying to run it like this x68k_sps_dec.exe -2 GM.BLK output.mid , When I run it, it flashes up the following

X68000 SPS Archive Unpacker
-------------------------------------------------
Archive Format: BLK


And thats it, it just pops up the command prompt again. From what I understand it should start listing the midi files below Archive Format : BLK" If you have any ideas what I am doing wrong, I would really appreciate the help. I want to get the midi files for both street fighter games and the Ghouls and Ghost one too.
I was doing all this in Windows 10 command prompt.

Thanks for sharing the midi extracter. I hope i can get it working
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  • ValleyBell Offline
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Post by ValleyBell »

Where the .hdf file is located does not matter. The tool doesn't use it and will not work with the HDF directly.

You need to extract GM.BLK or FM.BLK from the HDF file. Then you call the tool with the path of the (extracted) GM.BLK and an output file name that is used as a pattern for the written MID files.

EDIT: I just noticed that the tool will silently exit after the "Archive Type" line when it can not find GM.BLK - oops. (The archive type is determined by the file extension and not by the content.)
I usually print an error message, but apparently I forgot about that in this tool.

So, if it prints "Archive format: ###" and NO line "Compression: ###", then it can't open the input (archive) file.
  • Wizil Offline
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Post by Wizil »

Is there an easy way to extract the .BLK files? like a straight forward program that will work with .HDF. I looked into (and downloaded a few programs) to try to view and extract the files. I got stuck unfortunately. I could not get the GDALINFO SF2.HDF to find the data sets (it was saying that it could not recognize the .HDF. I was trying to use the following video as instruction
in a youtube video "How to Open HDF files in QGIS"

At this point i would really like to get the extractor working but I just dont feel i have the background.

Any other ideas, before I just painfully start to rip the songs one by one (playing the midis and recording the midi data using Cubase). it works but takes a lot of time.
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  • ValleyBell Offline
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Post by ValleyBell »

For Japanese computer disk images, you usually use Disk Explorer to extract and reinsert files.

Anything that is related to GDAL and QGIS is wrong as those tools are dealing with totally different types of data.
  • Wizil Offline
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Post by Wizil »

Ok that did the trick!!.. Thanks for being patient with me and answering some likely laughable questions.

It did error out when I put the -2 in the command line for some reason. x68k_sps_dec.exe -2 GM.BLK Output.mid
Decompression Error at 0x00000B: Accessing out-of-bounds data!

But if i tried the autodetect it worked (x68k_sps_dec.exe GM.BLK Output.mid)

Dude I was wasting so much time trying to figure out what to do, so thank you for the help.

Edit: Actually the Error was my fault. I was doing SF2 CE (instead of SSF2) which needed the -1 instead of -2. Thanks again

Post by spiffythedog »

This might be a long shot, but would anyone be able to shout me a compiled version of ValleyBell's mps2mid tool? I'm curious to see if it also works with *.BIN files extracted from *.CAT files of other MicroProse games using the decat utility included with tttools. Examples include David Leadbetter's Greens, The Legacy: Realm of Terror, B-17 Flying Fortress, Formula One Grand Prix/World Circuit and X-COM 1 & 2.

EDIT: nwc12mid for old New World Computing games looks very useful as well. I'll be extremely thankful to anyone who can provide a compiled version of either utility.
  • Corak Offline
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Post by Corak »

ValleyBell wrote:EDIT: I made a GitHub repository that contains the source code to all tools I ever wrote.
Thank you very much!
Just compiled most of them(target os, Windows,x86):
http://coraksoft1.narod.ru/soft/convert ... 0230626.7z

But still errors with compiling tools:
M2MidiDec,Midi1to0,Soundfont,TaitoZoom,YamahaDemoSongDump
If you have copiled binaries, please send.
Attachments
ValleyBell-MidiConverters-v20230626.7z
(387 KiB) Downloaded 217 times

Post by spiffythedog »

Cheers, Corak!
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