Oh hey, new activity in this thread. Sorry I missed it for three months. It looks like the last time VOGONS sent me notifications for it was in 2020, so I'll have to look into why they stopped.
Shortly after releasing this soundfont in 2017, pachuco got in contact with me and shared the work he and a colleague were doing on WGKnife (seen earlier in the thread). If I remember, the ultimate goal, if it could be achieved, was to create a tool that could take the original WINGROOV.TPD and do a complete conversion to .sfz format from beginning to end with no manual intervention. Not surprisingly, there were some complications and the project ground to a halt. I think the biggest issue was figuring out how WinGroove's volume parameters worked and how to translate them to dB attentation values as used in soundfonts. Envelope values also proved to be quick tricky and inconsistent.
If nothing else, we gained the ability to rip samples directly instead of having to dub them over by hand. As you can see from DJTony81's version of the soundfont, this has the potential to provide a pretty dramatic reduction in file size. However, now that I'm looking at his version, I see that it only has the size down to 2.87 MB (from 3.34 MB in my version). A reduction to just over 2.0 MB should be possible based on my work with it.
Since a fully automated conversion of WinGroove wasn't panning out, I decided to work on a "version 2.0" of the WinGroove soundfont that used a combination of samples and instrument data ripped using WGKnife and manual corrections to make it sound more faithful to the original where needed. However that, too, ran out of steam and I've been meaning to get back to it ever since. I think I got to the drums and the grueling nature of it just killed whatever motivation I had.
There is still a chance I may resume work on this soundfont at a later date. At the very least, I wanted to let everybody know that I haven't completely abandoned it. Don't let that stop anybody else from making their own, especially if they think they can improve on it.