There *are* actual MIDI events into those files: after the first 28 bytes, whose purpose is unknown, the rest of each file goes like this: 4 bytes of valid MIDI event ($8x yy zz for note off, $9x yy zz for note on, etc), 4 bytes of unknown stuff. Unfortunately there's not much you can do with them. The problem is that they're not standard midi files. Yeah that's right, the 112 "midis" are stored compressed in midiout.dll, and thanks to LOst we could finally access the "midis" themselves. Well, with saxman jumping out, I might as well post what we found out.Īn excellent LOst disassembled something and as a result he managed to write a decompressor for those tracks. If someone wants to play the reverse engineering game with me, here is a RAR file with the 112 "tracks" (56 GM, 56 FM) extracted from midiout.dll My midis weren't much different from these, which is why I don't like how some people don't care to release sloppy works just to say "hey I did that!".Īnyway, I'll keep on researching on midiout.dll to see if I can figure out how those midis are stored, but I doubt I'll succeed, since even saxman (the MIDI god™) failed at this task It is easy enough to come up with a set like this, as I said I was making one at a certain point, with a Roland E-86 keyboard hooked up to my Sound Blaster AWE 32 via MPU-401. ![]() They're only good for listening, but hardly usable for any other purpose such as porting, because of their low level of accuracy. Maybe I chose the wrong words to express that, but I'm a perfectionist when it comes to music, and even if I realise that those midis are probably the best we can currently get, I don't like them at all. Sorry about that, but the quality of those rips IS questionable. You did a pretty good job pointing out how ignorant kids are today about things like that, though We also didn't have any super-fancy hacking utilities or information, Sonic or otherwise, so not only was this pretty much the most acceptable means of filesharing at the time, those midi rips were as top-of-the-line as you could get. Also, Arrow credited MechTail right at the bottom of the page, and also made note of other sites that he was aware of that hosted the same thing, which would probably be due to the fact that MechTail was actually one of his friends, and those are the sites he chose to pass them off to up-front. That shit is roughly late '97/early '98, when we were just coming out of the era of small, not-widely-popularized sites littered all-across the internet was all there really was. If I'm remembering correctly, they were both done using some program that intercepted midi commands coming from the game program, so they're not exactly decently-laid-out, and the timing is slightly off, mostly due to trying this on an older systemĪlso, I see two more posts cropped up in the time it took me to click "respond", but you're quite an ass, Nineko. I've had rips of the two versions up on my own site forever, one of which was the original package version of that set, with credit listed as "unknown" because I keep forgetting to fix it: GM version - ripped by Paul Lapensee / "MechTail" probably before you were born ¬.¬ FM Version - ripped by MaliceX and distributed at Area51 MB (I think he sent them to me for that purpose) My best guess is that "Japanese song informist" and the "(Japanese Version)" labels littered around are a testament to the fact that even I believed a couple of the bullshit things flying around on Area51 a long time ago :/ Those old free-hosting sites we used to build are quite embarassing. ![]() So yeah, these midis are a very poor attempt, also hosted on a website that tries to rape your computer (make sure to disable java and javascript before clicking that link or you'll need a new computer).Ĭlick to expand.Oh holy hell, I had completely forgotten about that place. Apparently someone else just wanted some publicity and posted those midis to look like a hero, and apparently he succeeded too since people think those midis are working (I doubt Centurey is the only one who has been fooled). ![]() ![]() I didn't feel like releasing a sloppy work. I could have made and released a set like this about 10 years ago, but I didn't for the reasons above. If you open these midis in a midi editor you'll see that the notes don't align to beats and measures, they're randomly spread all over the place, and it can't be otherwise since all of them have a nominal tempo of 100 bpm. They just set the keyboard to record whatever it arrived from its MIDI in port, without caring about synchronization at all. As a result of this, the internal timing of the midis is completely broken. Those midis AREN'T conversions from the original midi data, they have been created by hooking up a midi keyboard to a computer via the MPU-401 port, I did that too ages ago. Click to expand.I can't speak for everyone, but I knew about this set, and I think also other people knew.
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