Trying to rip the midis from an old game

http://www.myabandonware.com/game/solar-winds-galaxy-20e

Regardless of the site name, it is indeed shareware, so no need to worry there. I'm pretty sure the music is midis, as you need to set up a midi device in its config - but everything is .dat files. I've opened some of them up in notepad but they don't look like typical midis. Am I going to have to resort to recording them in audacity?

Not every game back then used standard MIDI files -in fact, very few of them did.

If you are lucky, it might be using an "almost" MIDI format (RMI, XMI, etc.) that can be converted with relatively little pain to standard MIDI files.

Another possibility is that it used one of the countless "Adlib tracker" formats. In that case, it's possible that it has already been ripped, and can be played losslessly in AdPlug.

Follow the links here to find rips of Adlib music.

Edit: it seems that the most important of them, http://chiptunes.back2roots.org/, is dead :-/

I'm sure I have some almost complete downloads of the goodies somewhere, but it will take me time to find them. In the meantime, you could access the site through the Wayback Machine.

You may want to contact Leileilol.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yQGtFH9qZM

Ran into this video and it's owned by him/her. As Maes said, it's definitely the similar "Almost Midi"/Adlib tracker used by games like Xargon and Jill of the Jungle.

It's this:
http://www.shikadi.net/moddingwiki/CMF_Format

Here's a more kosher link if the mods are keen to remove the other one:
http://www.classicdosgames.com/game/Solar_Winds.html

Heh I remember how I had managed to finish the Shareware's plot:

Now that I think about it, it was a pretty cool game: the music was awesome, and I had mastered the controls to the point where I could defeat any ship in battle, including the very first encounter in the game with the cloaked alien ship ;-)

Maes said:

Heh I remember how I had managed to finish the Shareware's plot:

Spoiler

Completing it involved travelling to a relatively remote location on the world map, which was more than 1500 units away, in a straight line, which was enormous in terms of typical game speeds.

To travel there in the shortest amount of time possible, I adjusted the course of the ship to follow the hypothenuse of the the x and y coordinates (and I recall thinking that was ONE time where school geometry came in handy), rerouted all power to propulsion, and I think it still took something like 10 or 15 minutes to reach the destination.

Now that I think about it, it was a pretty cool game: the music was awesome, and I had mastered the controls to the point where I could defeat any ship in battle, including the very first encounter in the game with the cloaked alien ship ;-)

I remember trying to go all over the map before the big reveal about shields being in place and having my ship go boom... - I thought it was a deliberately created game limitation.

Have you played the sequel?

invictius said:

Have you played the sequel?

I only played the Shareware, and that was nearly 20 years ago. I would like to get back to it, though.