Martin Fernandez reply

Martin Fernandez replies...

"Hello, Well, I'm another big fan of Wolf3d. It's great to see that you liked the player! My initial project was to convert all the musics to MIDI. In order to fully understand the structure of the music tracks, I decided to build a music player. So now I know what every byte-sequence in the tracks mean. Unfortunately, MIDI conversion is harder to accomplish.

I started writing a converter and managed a partial translation of a couple of tracks. But I had other real-life matters to attend to and temporarily abandoned it. Basically, you have to map Adlib frequencies to notes. It can be done (and I did, but each track is a separate problem to handle). Then you have to map 'volume' -> MIDI velocity. Again, it can be done, but I stopped working at that point. And don't forget the 'sound textures', matching Adlib voices to MIDI instruments; and drum tracks. Even then, most of the songs have effects like vibrato, slides and such. And on the MIDI world it is again possible to achieve such effects. But you need a very intelligent program to successfully detect and convert stuff like that. And what I have so far is not a real smart piece of code, just basic translation. Anyway, to do it properly, human supervision is required.

What can I say? It is possible to create an automatic converter, and you would have to manually supervise and re-arrange every track in order to get something similar to the original. I have seen four or five Wolf MIDI's out there, some are perfect translations and I keep wondering where did they come from (Apogee itself?). But someone has to write such a program.

If you want to/have some programming knowledge, I can help you with what I already know. Else... Maybe sometime in the future I get motivated again and finish the conversion. Maybe someone else did something similar with other games and can provide the extra effort.

Why not try contacting the guys at HYPERLINK http://www.mixnmojo.com/highland/. They converted lots of Adlib songs from LucasArts games and are experts on the subject? Then again, maybe they grew tired of doing so. If they are willing to help and need some info on the track structure, let them contact me. If all of the above fails, you can still learn how to program it (I can help you out a bit) and do it yourself! That's how most utilities get born.

Well? Tell me about it. See you, Martin Fernandez"

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