Noob help: not sure which forum to post my question in

[silar]

I'm not sure this meta question really belongs in this feedback forum either, but I don't know where else to start.

I'm trying to find anyone who knows about the music from D1, specifically the remix soundtrack used in the Mac shareware demo and how to extract it properly (it's not the same as the PC versions or the Mac full release). Most of the sub forums seem dedicated to stuff like multiplayer or modding or whatnot, without a generalized "stuff about the game" forum. Where should I post questions like this?

[CDN_Merlin]

This should be in the Tech section as it relates to something technical about the game.

[silar]

I guess I should say that I don't REALLY care about the nitty gritty of the extraction process or how to do it. Ultimately all I'm looking for are MP3/WAVE/OGGs of the music. If someone has already done that in the past and uploaded it somewhere that would be great. Alternatively if someone happens to know that, say, the mac demo music was made to sound like the pc demo music run through an OLP/OMG/WTF/BBQ sound card maybe I can try looking for that on youtube or whatever.

I'm mainly interested in trying to find anyone who knows literally anything about the Mac demo music. I seem to be like one of five people on earth who remember the demo even existed, much less played it.

[Krom]

The D2X-XL site has the mac shareware data files: https://www.dxx-rebirth.com/game-content/
The original music would be MIDI files which are stored inside those data files. The problem is they will sound differently depending on the audio device in use to play them back. Though these days it should be reasonably possible to emulate any device / os / etc under the sun with a player that supports loading a MIDI sound font. Unfortunately extracting the audio can be a pretty involved process that may require running ancient 16 bit windows software which won't work on a modern 64 bit OS, so it may be a significant project.

[silar]

Right I know that but it isn't really relevant to my situation I don't think. I guess the backstory to this question is too complicated so I'll just ask it here outright and then people can tell me what other forum to copy/paste this into.



The original Descent 1 for PC had IIRC two different soundtracks (wavetables and FM synthesis). The Mac and Playstation retail versions used their own much higher CD-quality soundtrack. However the original Mac shareware/demo version had yet its own soundtrack... one that no one seems to know much about. There are no youtube videos of that soundtrack, and hardly any references on the web (outside of a couple scattered people like me asking about it, but with no answers).

I have an old Powermac that still runs and I have both the shareware demo version and the retail version on it, and the demo is definitely a different mix than the PC demo. I'm ASSUMING this music is stored as MIDI like most other versions of Descent, since the files are nowhere near big enough to have uncompressed audio and there was no reason to re-write it as MOD or S3M or something.

Macs of that era played MIDI through the built-in "Quicktime Instruments" library, which as I understand it was effectively the same as PC wavetable but in software. Macs of that era also had a weird filesystem where files were split into a "data fork" and a "resource fork". As far as apps of the time went, the raw C code was in the data fork but pretty much everything else (window/menu layouts, sound effects, icons, graphics, etc) were in the resource fork. Except MIDI music. For whatever reason that was almost always stored in the data fork.

While there are about a hundred utilities to break up and extract all the bits from the resource fork of an app, the data fork was I guess more abstract and it seems like you need to write something custom. I have old Mac utilities on that computer which extract the MIDI from other games, but can't find one for the Descent demo (unsurprisingly).

Now, assuming this music is in fact stored as MIDI internally somewhere like the PC version, once it's extracted the playback shouldn't be an issue. Quicktime was the only option for MIDI so the music was 100% guaranteed to play the same on any Mac the demo would run on. If I can get the MIDI tracks out I can render them to AIFF/WAVE using that library and then subsequently encode that into MP3 or whatever.

Of course, all this assumes someone else hasn't already done all this. Or like I said if someone happens to point out that the Mac Quicktime version is nearly the same as like the PC shareware version when played on a specific card or something. Really all I want is to listen to the music the way it played on Macs (or damn near it) without having to boot that old Mac or an emulator every time.

[silar]

I should also point out FWIW that the Mac demo only has one HOG and one PIG file, and AFAIK the MIDI music isn't stored in either of those. (At least, I've copied them to Windows machines and extracted them but it's not there).

[silar]

Also: If I download the PC retail and shareware wavetable MIDI files off the web and play them on the Mac, they're totally recognizable but not the same. Presumably they rewrote the tracks slightly so they sounded better under Quicktime.