About 6 months ago I made a simple little program that lets you edit your DRO files (the raw OPL dumps from DOSBox), instead of writing a dissertation. Then I forgot about it. Well, now I'm releasing that program out into the wild.

It's really very basic - it can read data from a DRO file, delete any OPL instructions you don't want, and then save the data to a new or existing file. Everything else is intended to help you determine what instructions to remove. The "analyze" button will attempt to find a loop by splitting the data in half and finding the largest block of instructions common to both halves. The readme also contains some hints on deleting instructions. I'll just mention here that one useful trick is that if instruments are screwed up or missing completely, and the very first instruction in the DRO is a delay (usually fairly long), delete that delay and it should fix it.

Anyway, I hope someone else will find it useful. Hopefully we can get some decent rips out there!

Windows binary:
Extract the contents of the zip to the destination folder, run "dro_trimmer_1.exe".
http://www.box.net/shared/2kgscg41l5 (5.6 MB)

Source code:
DRO Trimmer is written in Python. It requires wxPython and PythonCard, and I don't know what version of Python (I'm using 2.51, but it could probably run on 2.3 and up).
http://www.box.net/shared/v06ydu6mze (0.01 MB)

Examples:
A bunch of DRO files in untrimmed and trimmed forms.
http://www.box.net/shared/bfl75krnda (0.2 MB)

Misc notes:
- loading the DRO data into the table is slow and consumes a fair amount of memory because I got lazy and PythonCard doesn't let you use dynamic table thingies.
- I don't think it saves the song length correctly, but AdPlug doesn't read it anyway so I didn't think it was necessary to fix.
- sorry the binary is so big, this is because I used wxPython which is notorious for making large executables. I actually compressed the hell out of it - it was going to be 17mb otherwise!
- Props to the original author of DRO-ED, a much more sophisticated DRO editor that is sadly useless.
- I've noticed there's a slight pause at the end of playing a song using AdPlug & Winamp. I don't know why, but I don't think it's my fault (unless it's related to the song length).
- I haven't worked on it in 6 months, and haven't tested it with DRO files output from DOSBox 0.70, but I'm sure they work just peachy.

EDIT:
In case anyone stumbles onto this ancient post looking for the tool, a modern version is available at my website:
http://www.jestarjokin.net/apps/drotrimmer