Spikey wrote:

I got turned onto (pun not intended) some of Accolade's older titles, such as Les Manley and Altered Destiny. Their music is stored in DAT files, but I have no idea how to extract it. I tried a lot of general programs but no avail.

I can record using DOSBox (and have), but there are reasons why it's good to have the original MIDI data as well.

Why don't you use dosbox' midi recording feature? The original games do not use standard midi file format but their own so I'm not sure what's the point. Unless there's a converter (there might be, based on some other accolade titles, I haven't looked). In such case let me know the titles and I'll send you the files I extracted years ago.

My bet is that Altered Destiny uses some music data apart from instrument translation tables contained in instr.dat. These tables are seemingly used to translate ingame music into a format acceptable by playback device.

Thus, my assumption is that there is no any MIDI data stored in game files. Just some data that is translated into MIDI using that instr.dat.

Mok: I did record the in-game MIDI data. Extracted data is good also because it's more accurate, plus it contains ALL the music so if you forget a cue, or if there's some unused music in the resources, you get it 😀
Altered Destiny and the 2 Les Manley games are what I'm looking for, by the way. Thanks in advance for what you do have.

bristlehog: That's possible too. Since all 3 games (Les 1+2/Altered) were composed for the MT-32, I wonder if that MIDI data is in there and that the drivers just convert the standard MT-32 MIDI data to Adlib/PC Speaker/etc.

Since instr.dat (of Altered Destiny) contains three sections: Adlib, Roland MT-32/LAPC-I and Casio CT-460, I doubt your version. Seems something is converted into Adlib, MT-32 and CT-460 compatible data, thus that something would barely be already MT-32 compatible. PC speaker music is usually stored separately, because of only one voice supported. Some driver systems (Miles AIL 2.0 and 3.0+ among them) allow playing MIDI data over a PC speaker, but the result is highly unpredictable since one voice is played while others are discarded.

In Altered Destiny setup program, you can choose from PC Speaker, Tandy (I believe 3-voice one), CMS and MIDI. For MIDI, you have three options: Generic, MT-32 and CT-460. Selecting Generic, you hear only piano music (it is so intended, according to the help files). Also, Generic option is absent from instr.dat file; thus, we can assume that MIDI music is stored in a 'Generic' format where all tracks are piano or none; being converted for Adlib, MT-32 or Casio CT-460 when such option is selected in setup. PC Speaker, CMS and Tandy music seems to be stored in some other format(s).

Spikey wrote:

Altered Destiny and the 2 Les Manley games are what I'm looking for, by the way. Thanks in advance for what you do have.

Sure. Here are my old Hoot drivers for these games. Attempting to run any code from the archives will result in a crash, but the raw songs are in *.mus files.

What are 'Hoot' drivers and how did you extract that raw music from DAT files?

bristlehog wrote:

What are 'Hoot' drivers and how did you extract that raw music from DAT files?

Hoot is a crappy closed-source japanese emulator for various sound systems (including various obscure japanese machines, arcades and poor emulation of pc sound systems). In short it's a simplistic player for game music for various systems in their original format (hoot includes emulators for various cpus). It's bad but there's nothing else unless you want to play the games or bother with midi/opl captures and similar. In the past I (and couple of other people) created drivers for hundreds of non-japanese games (adlib/mt-32/gm). Unfortunately while Hoot can be downloaded from it's japanese source, I have no idea if any of the pc game drivers are currently available anywhere (there wasn't much interest for it anyway).

As for extracting... it was done just like for any other game... look at the game executable, locate and extract the file decompressor, use it to unpack the data files. It's been a long time, I didn't keep anything after the driver was working so can't say anything about these 3 games 😀

Thanks for the replies, especially to Mok!

Sure. Here are my old Hoot drivers for these games. Attempting to run any code from the archives will result in a crash, but the raw songs are in *.mus files.

I tried using an old Accolade player for the MUS format and they didn't play..
Is there any way to convert them?

Also, what is music.bin? A converting program or does it contain music data?

Spikey wrote:

I tried using an old Accolade player for the MUS format and they didn't play..
Is there any way to convert them?

Most likely at least 2 of these are too old (early version of accolade format). Lost in LA uses newer version but I don't know what's supported by that player. And no, I don't know of any way to convert them.

Also, what is music.bin? A converting program or does it contain music data?

It's a player extracted from the game's code and used in hoot to play the songs. Unfortunately hoot does not have any midi capturing options. It is possible to write a dos player and then use dosbox's midi capture on each song, but that requires more time than I currently have, especially with each game using different player.

Thanks for the clarification! Lost in LA's MUS files did indeed playback, although the tempo was off. But DOSBox is able to record that, and I was able to verify that my MIDi recordings had all the game's data, which they did. Thanks 😀

Wish I had a way to do it for King and Altered, but if you ever have time, let me know!

BTW for interested folks the Accolade MUS player for Les 2 can be found here:
http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=32_Sound

Mok wrote:

Unfortunately while Hoot can be downloaded from it's japanese source, I have no idea if any of the pc game drivers are currently available anywhere (there wasn't much interest for it anyway).

My current archive is available at http://hoot.joshw.info/, should have all of your rips and then some (476 games).
Thanks for taking the time to rip them. 😀