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SCI Community How To's & Tutorials / Re: SCI music patch formats

« on: September 17, 2013, 05:19:43 PM »

Well, Cloudschatze over on the Quest Studios forums has cleared things up a little - on SCI0, patch 004 is not for GM or FB-01, but for the Casio MT-540 (while patch 007 is for the CT-460/CSM-1.) And as I suspected, it's a basic instrument/rhythm map translating the game's voices to Casio presets. So that's most of my questions answered. The only remaining thing I'm curious about is how drum mapping is done on FB-01/MFC; the first five patches in the test game's set are drum patches, but I'm not sure if the driver does its own translation from MT-32 rhythm sounds to fixed patch numbers, or if there are perhaps alternate tracks for FB-01/MFC that specifically utilize these patches. I'll try and figure this out once my FB-01 gets here...

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SCI Community How To's & Tutorials / Re: SCI music patch formats

« on: September 16, 2013, 09:43:59 PM »

Okay, I dumped the patch resources for MFC, FB-01, and CSM-1 from the SCI Companion test game to dig around in with a hex editor. The MFC patch resource (patch 002) is almost completely straightforward - it's mostly a bunch of 64-byte blocks with names at the beginning, which look to exactly match the FB-01's internal voice format as documented in its manual. (The internal representation, not the SysEx representation, which is awkwardly chopped up into nybble values!) The only part I'm not clear on is a couple of 2-byte sections at the beginning and middle of the file. The first is "89 00" (hex,) which (if I'm reading the available information correctly) is just the type ID for a patch resource. The second (which occurs after the first 48 voices - the size of one FB-01 bank - out of 96 total) is "AB CD," which isn't found in the other two but does show up close to the end of the MT-32 patch resource (and nowhere else in either the MFC resource or the MT-32 resource.) Anybody know what this signifies? The ScummVM wiki seems to think it's merely a separator, since the MFC patch file can contain either one or two banks. If this is true, then it should be trivial to create a new set of patches from FB-01 banks. I've got an FB-01 in the mail, so I'll give it a shot when I get a chance.

Interestingly, however, the resource SCI Companion labels as "FM-01" (I presume they mean FB-01?,) patch 004, is completely different - it's only 235 bytes long, has no FB-01 patch blocks in it, and looks a heck of a lot like the CSM-1 patch resource, patch 007. Both files have the "89 00" ID followed by fourteen zero bytes, and then have what look to be a series of two-byte pairs in which the second byte is almost always zero, and then end with the exact same last 46 bytes. I have no idea what this is. For the CSM-1, I presume that it must contain some sort of instrument map, since the CSM-1 doesn't have custom patch capability and only has about thirty presets, but I'm not sure why the FB-01 would need a similar file...anybody know anything about this?

Edit: the ScummVM Wiki says that patch 004 is used by the GM driver, and gives a file format, only the file format doesn't at all match the resource with the SCI Companion test game - for starters, the test game's patch 004 is much too short! Oy...

Further edit: the ScummVM Wiki also claims that the FB-01 driver uses patch 002 as well, which makes more sense (though it means SCI Companion doesn't know what it's talking about.) Still no idea how the CSM-1 patch 007 works, though...

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SCI Community How To's & Tutorials / Re: SCI music patch formats

« on: September 05, 2013, 06:53:58 PM »

This. The moment we stop doing things because we are fascinated by it and start doing it for the LCD only is the moment when it stops being fun. This whole community was started because of the "how cool would it be..." factor.

Right on

That's why I was going to program KQ2SCI to support Adlib, the MT-32, PC Speaker, and Tandy 3-voice/PCjr because it was awesome. Maybe nobody would take advantage of it, maybe they would. I don't care about that.

Well I sure would - I've got all of those on-hand! No sense letting 'em go to waste

Keep me updated if you find anything out about support for those other devices! If anything comes of it I'd love to make plans for supporting them in KQ2SCI as well (if I ever get around to finishing it).

I will. Crossing my fingers that the Quest Studios folks will have some more information...

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SCI Community How To's & Tutorials / Re: SCI music patch formats

« on: September 05, 2013, 04:12:21 AM »

Oh, and for the Casios, here's a page with demo tracks (No Sierra tunes, though.) Limited and cheap, but surprisingly not bad. I'd love to know how it came about that Sierra decided to support it, though...what a random choice!

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SCI Community How To's & Tutorials / Re: SCI music patch formats

« on: September 05, 2013, 01:30:53 AM »

All true enough, I guess, but I'm mostly interested in it for the neatness factor, not for practical concerns.

As for how good the renditions on supported games were, there's a few recordings around the 'net - here and here, for example. They're not as good as they could be (the 4-op FM synths are capable of some great sounds,) but they're pretty good; they may or may not just be mapping to ROM presets, I dunno.

(Though someone should really make an MFC emulator like Munt does for the MT-32; emulation of the 4-op FM chips is quite good, more accurate than Munt most of the time...and you wouldn't even have to use ROM dumps, since there's no PCM and the FB-01 presets have already been around in SysEx format for forever.)

Anyway, I figured out the Quest Studios thing; you have to use the main site contact form to register, it just doesn't say that on the "registration blocked!" page for the forum...

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SCI Community How To's & Tutorials / Re: SCI music patch formats

« on: September 05, 2013, 12:17:59 AM »

While you could use the MIDI out from DOSBox, unless you are talking about a device that is a separate module, you have the problem of dealing with an ISA device. That starts to get fairly absurd and/or expensive.

A fair point; but then, while the IBM MFC is indeed an ISA card, it's just a MIDI interface glued to the innards of an existing Yamaha MIDI module (the FB-01) which can be had for about the same price as an MT-32, so it doesn't really seem that ridiculous, certainly not for the nice quality music you can get from it. (The Casio MT-540 and compatibles are also separate modules or keyboards, but I doubt their sound quality is all that good; Casio only ever made a few keyboards that sounded that interesting.)

As MI indicated, people on the Quest Studios forums would probably be able to provide more information.

Yeah, I'd ask there, but they've had registration disabled every single time I've visited...

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SCI Community How To's & Tutorials / Re: SCI music patch formats

« on: September 04, 2013, 11:38:01 PM »

Most of them are useless these days as SCI game are generally played using DOSBox.

Maybe so, but DOSBox itself supports routing emulated MIDI out to a real MIDI port, and FB-01s can be had pretty cheaply; it'd be fun to support them. (Well-programmed 4-op FM can even sound better than an MT-32 in some instances!)

(Hmm...wonder if my V50 is backwards-compatible with the SysEx format for the FB-01...? Probably not. My TX81Z might've been, though.)

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SCI Community How To's & Tutorials / SCI music patch formats

« on: September 04, 2013, 06:49:01 PM »

Okay, there's already converters to create patch resources from MT-32 SysEx files and Adlib banks, but I'm curious if anybody knows anything about some of the other supported drivers. The IBM Music Feature Card is just a Yamaha FB-01 with a MIDI interface; there's plenty of editors for FB-01 and other Yamaha 4-op FM synths out there, but is there any information on the patch format for the MFC driver that would allow conversion from an FB-01 bank? What about the Casio CSM-1/MT-540? As near as I can tell it doesn't even have editable patches; does the patch file just map MIDI instrument changes to the built-in voices?