VOGONS


First post, by Danfun64

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

Hello! I would like to know if a tool exists that allows to extract Lucasarts .IMS music container to individual files. I'd also like to know if there was a way to place those individual files into the relatively newer Lucasarts format .MDR . The reason i ask is that for Star Wars X-Wing, the Roland (CM-32L) music track is the best choice in the game...but only in the Floppy version. The DOS CD port converts the General Midi tracks (themselves apparently converted from the Roland Floppy score) back to Roland format, resulting in lost audio fidelity. Basically, I'd like to place the Floppy Roland files into the CD version of the game. Also, I'd like to be able to access the Roland MIDIs directly so i could make MUNT recordings from them for use with the Windows port of X-Wing (which used what appear to be Lo-Fi Roland CD recordings for cutscenes).

Since these formats are shared with other Lucasarts games, I'd hope something existed tools wise concerning them. If not, it was worth asking anyways.

edit: ...yeah, I have no idea where this kind of thread is supposed to go. At first I had it on DOS...but I'm not trying to get a game to run, per se.

Last edited by Danfun64 on 2017-11-11, 03:26. Edited 2 times in total.

Reply 2 of 18, by Danfun64

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

Wait a minute... I just realized...are .IMS and .MDR files drivers instead of containers?

...i'm an idiot. I think what I meant to be looking for is tools for .LFD format.

edit: and as it turns out, SLADE supports LFD for replacing files... and it turns out that the ROLAND.LFD files are identical. So once again we look at the drivers. It appears that ROLAND.MDR ignores the ROLAND.LFD file and instead converts the GMIDI.LFD music from general midi to mt-32 compatible in real time or something. So... back to square one. Any way to modify the driver to actually use the Roland format instead of back converting it from General Midi?

edit: I tried renaming ROLAND.LFD to RLAND.LFD and then hex editing BWING.EXE to look for that instead of GMIDI.LFD...no difference in sound. I then tried the original EXE but renamed ROLAND.LFD to GMIDI.LFD...again no difference.

Reply 3 of 18, by Danfun64

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

Bump. Anybody have any suggestions whatsoever?

Reply 4 of 18, by veggies

User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie

Did you ever find a solution for this? I'm looking to do exactly the same thing. I'm sure it's possible for someone with the interest and technical ability.

Reply 5 of 18, by stinkydiver

User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie

Bump. This would be great.. I have an MT32 and both versions of the game. Would love to hear the MT32 compositions on the CD version.

Take that there and put it in here

Reply 6 of 18, by cyclone3d

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++

The Windows version should be fairly easy.... Record the MT-32 music from the floppy version and replace the recorded files in the Windows version.

No clue about replacing the DOS CD version music.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 7 of 18, by Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman

User metadata
Rank l33t
Rank
l33t

I am actually looking for similar moddings. The Collector's CD ROM version of both X-Wing and TIE Fighter runs on Windows 9x, has texture mapped graphics (which I like so much), but replaces the game's dynamic MIDI music with looping Red Book audio recordings of the Star Wars score. 😵

Is there any way to modify the Collector's CD ROM version to use dynamic MIDI music during flight? I always want to re-play TIE Fighter with texture mapped graphics, but with General MIDI music using the best sound font for the game's music.

Never thought this thread would be that long, but now, for something different.....
Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman.

Reply 8 of 18, by Zup

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie
cyclone3d wrote on 2020-12-13, 06:03:

The Windows version should be fairly easy.... Record the MT-32 music from the floppy version and replace the recorded files in the Windows version.

Not a big deal.

The point is that X-Wing and Tie Fighter use a kind of dynamic music. Imagine that you are patrolling a friendly empty spot in space... you have a calm music, but at the moment that some hostile ships jump out of hyperspace you'll get an accelerated "get into the action" music. When you shot down (down? in space?) the last hostile or when the ship you escort is safe, the music will step down. Obviously, a pre-recorded soundtrack won't do this things.

It's a shame that Lucas Arts made CD-ROM audio mandatory for CD-ROM versions of X-Wing and Tie Fighter. DOS CD-ROM versions ran at 640x480 (high-res!), and Windows 95 added better models, shaded surfaces and hardware acceleration to the game. A version that had the graphics of Windows 95 and the music of floppy versions would have been the definitive edition (although pre-recorded music sounded better, a wavesynth sound card with dynamic music is way more immersive).

I have traveled across the universe and through the years to find Her.
Sometimes going all the way is just a start...

I'm selling some stuff!

Reply 9 of 18, by Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman

User metadata
Rank l33t
Rank
l33t
Zup wrote on 2020-12-13, 11:27:

It's a shame that Lucas Arts made CD-ROM audio mandatory for CD-ROM versions of X-Wing and Tie Fighter. DOS CD-ROM versions ran at 640x480 (high-res!), and Windows 95 added better models, shaded surfaces and hardware acceleration to the game. A version that had the graphics of Windows 95 and the music of floppy versions would have been the definitive edition (although pre-recorded music sounded better, a wavesynth sound card with dynamic music is way more immersive).

Precisely.

How difficult it is to modify the Windows 95 version to play dynamic MIDI music like the floppy version does?

Never thought this thread would be that long, but now, for something different.....
Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman.

Reply 11 of 18, by RetroGamer4Ever

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie
Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote on 2020-12-13, 15:17:
Zup wrote on 2020-12-13, 11:27:

It's a shame that Lucas Arts made CD-ROM audio mandatory for CD-ROM versions of X-Wing and Tie Fighter. DOS CD-ROM versions ran at 640x480 (high-res!), and Windows 95 added better models, shaded surfaces and hardware acceleration to the game. A version that had the graphics of Windows 95 and the music of floppy versions would have been the definitive edition (although pre-recorded music sounded better, a wavesynth sound card with dynamic music is way more immersive).

Precisely.

How difficult it is to modify the Windows 95 version to play dynamic MIDI music like the floppy version does?

Just bumping this to give the current state of things. The only option available to get the original MIDI music back is the music mod (They exist for X-Wing, TIE Fighter, and the TCs of both games for X-Wing Alliance) that takes the old MIDI and replaces it with new recordings done with the latest DAW sampling, making it sound like a live orchestra is playing the old score. The original assets are apparently still mixed in with the Special Edition game assets (or so I've been told), but the Direct3D-capable engine used in the game has no code whatsoever for using MIDI and it can't be added without modding the source-code that only Totally Games has access to. Totally Games is now completely defunct and the devs have all moved on to other companies, so there's never going to be any further updates, though a source-code release could possibly happen down the line from one of them, if we're lucky.

Here are samples of what I speak of......

https://soundcloud.com/laserschwert/sets/tie
https://soundcloud.com/laserschwert/sets/x-wing

Reply 12 of 18, by swaaye

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++

X-Wing / TIE Fighter Collector's Series are just ports to the XvT engine and that game uses redbook too. IMUSE was locked to DOS and they didn't want to invest in a Win95 version at the time, plus redbook was all the rage. But for X-Wing Alliance they developed a Win9x compatible IMUSE and it is interactive.

So just port XWing and TIE Fighter to the XWA engine and rework the music. 😀

Reply 13 of 18, by RetroGamer4Ever

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

As I said above, X-Wing and TIE have already been ported to XWA, with remastered orchestral music built from the original MIDI files, using today's HQ DAW samplers to give the experience of a real orchestra soundtrack.

Reply 14 of 18, by swaaye

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++
RetroGamer4Ever wrote on 2022-02-06, 17:45:

As I said above, X-Wing and TIE have already been ported to XWA, with remastered orchestral music built from the original MIDI files, using today's HQ DAW samplers to give the experience of a real orchestra soundtrack.

Hey. I saw the post but I figured it was just another non-interactive soundtrack. But, after some searching it does sound like it is dynamic to a degree. I suppose recreating what the IMUSE MIDI engine did would be rather involved. I remember it would fade instruments in and out as events occurred.

But I will have to check out the mods!

Reply 15 of 18, by RetroGamer4Ever

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

IMUSE music in the Star Wars games were merely "loopable" and composed in such a way as to make the dynamic transitions sound almost natural. With the recording based IMUSE, you simply duplicate the music from the MIDI files, in same-length recordings, and it works out the same way.

Reply 16 of 18, by swaaye

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++

I played through 5 or so missions of the TIE Fighter TC. It is very impressive. The music does seem to work well and feels authentic.

I used to follow the XWAU project but I haven't played with it in probably 15 years so it was interesting to see what they've accomplished in general too.

And I have VR gear so maybe I will try that out. Star Wars Squadrons in VR made me wish for the old games instead.

Reply 17 of 18, by danyetman

User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie
RetroGamer4Ever wrote on 2022-02-06, 17:45:

As I said above, X-Wing and TIE have already been ported to XWA, with remastered orchestral music built from the original MIDI files, using today's HQ DAW samplers to give the experience of a real orchestra soundtrack.

And I'm the one who did the music remastering. With TFTC coming out, though, it kind of gave an ultimate one-up to the whole Re-Orchestration Project, though. At some point, I'd love to go back and redo the music; I screwed up the looping at the end of most of the tracks in the last iteration, and never realized it until the whole thing was out on the 'net, and by that time, I was trying to work on the X-Wing ReOrchestrated project, but I was so burned out from TIE Fighter, that I gave up music for something like five years entirely.

swaaye wrote on 2022-02-06, 23:10:

Hey. I saw the post but I figured it was just another non-interactive soundtrack. But, after some searching it does sound like it is dynamic to a degree. I suppose recreating what the IMUSE MIDI engine did would be rather involved. I remember it would fade instruments in and out as events occurred.

But I will have to check out the mods!

It wasn't dynamic at all - the Special Edition that we used was built on the Xwing vs. TIE Fighter engine, so we were locked into streaming Redbook audio, and even that was kinda stupid at times. The Intro cutscene music, for example, caused the video to run at double speed unless we cut the quality in half to 22050Hz, unlike literally every other track in the game. For the mission audio, I recall there being maybe three music cues - battle, victory, and failure - and that was all. I do know that we eventually created a loop of a bunch of the battle music that would roll around on itself for the majority of the battle, but there wasn't anything dynamic about it. We all bitterly lamented the excision of iMuse, because otherwise, I would have been okay with creating a sound font from my virtual orchestra and having General MIDI triggers, but that was completely stripped out of the code. The fact that we got our programmer to do some ASM hackery to add the music back into the concourse (and, if I recall, the registration desk) was more or less a miracle - I seem to remember him complaining about how fucky things were in the '98 edition, and he had to do some serious refactoring in order to insert JMPs to unused memory locations just so he could side-load the new audio; looking back, and knowing more about coding, I get the impression that the original code actually specified memory addresses, so things were locked down pretty narrowly - adding a single line of code meant any references pointed to the same address, even though the code in that location had changed.

Reply 18 of 18, by swaaye

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++
danyetman wrote on 2024-01-02, 04:30:

It wasn't dynamic at all - the Special Edition that we used was built on the Xwing vs. TIE Fighter engine, so we were locked into streaming Redbook audio, and even that was kinda stupid at times. The Intro cutscene music, for example, caused the video to run at double speed unless we cut the quality in half to 22050Hz, unlike literally every other track in the game. For the mission audio, I recall there being maybe three music cues - battle, victory, and failure - and that was all. I do know that we eventually created a loop of a bunch of the battle music that would roll around on itself for the majority of the battle, but there wasn't anything dynamic about it. We all bitterly lamented the excision of iMuse, because otherwise, I would have been okay with creating a sound font from my virtual orchestra and having General MIDI triggers, but that was completely stripped out of the code. The fact that we got our programmer to do some ASM hackery to add the music back into the concourse (and, if I recall, the registration desk) was more or less a miracle - I seem to remember him complaining about how fucky things were in the '98 edition, and he had to do some serious refactoring in order to insert JMPs to unused memory locations just so he could side-load the new audio; looking back, and knowing more about coding, I get the impression that the original code actually specified memory addresses, so things were locked down pretty narrowly - adding a single line of code meant any references pointed to the same address, even though the code in that location had changed.

The end result is enjoyable enough I think. Thanks for all the effort.

I remember reading somewhere back in the day that Imuse was lost because it was DOS they didn't care to make it Win95 compatible. And of course this was the peak of the red book audio craze and MIDI became unappealing. So we got CD audio with X-Wing vs TIE Fighter and the Win95 editions of X-W and TIE. Then with X-Wing Alliance they moved to dynamic pre-recorded music of some sort.