Zone 66 music

[Malvineous]

Hi all,

I've just been experimenting with the Zone 66 music, and I have finally confirmed it is in CDFM/670 format. This is the same format (or near enough) to that used in Renaissance's Amnesia demo. Shortly after the demo's release, due to popular demand, they released a music player for it.

Unfortunately the music player won't play single files, it will only read songs from inside the Amnesia .exe file. So as a test, I replaced the last Amnesia song in the .exe with one of the decompressed music files from Zone 66. Sure enough this worked, and the Amnesia player is able to play songs from Zone 66.

If anyone wants to try this out, download the Amnesia music player and put this replacement .exe file into the directory before launching the player. In the player, press the "2" key to hear the second song, which is the Zone 66 title music.

This on its own doesn't achieve a huge amount, but at least it does confirm that the Zone 66 songs definitely are in this file format!

[Malvineous]

Just to follow up on this, the main point of this experiment was to be able to play an uncompressed Zone 66 music file. The game itself won't play uncompressed files, so to avoid having to write a file compressor the Amnesia player can be used to play files without needing to recompress them first.

Why is this important? Because it allows you to modify the music files in a hex editor and then play them, to hear what you have changed of course! I have now spent some time doing this, and have nearly completed reverse engineering the CDFM/670 file format. The format description is up on the ModdingWiki under CDFM Format. Luckily it was a lot simpler than I was expecting. Unlike .mod files and their derivatives, there aren't any effects to deal with so the format is actually quite simple.

Next step is to write a player for it!

[leilei]

Cool!

I figured the format might be simple. I mean, I did try transcribing one song by ear and realized the plan of the fm/pcm mix format is to have around 8+ channels go without a hitch on 386 computers.

[Malvineous]

I had always been put off because I expected the format to be really complex, like a lot of tracker formats. So it was a nice surprise to find out how straightforward it was. Although I haven't tried anything to do with digital or GUS instruments yet, only OPL.

I have a working player now though, so as a proof of concept I have converted the theme song to CMF format: zone66-title.cmf. I think the pitch of the notes is very slightly off, but it sounds pretty good already.

[Malvineous]

If anyone's still interested, I managed to convert the Sound Blaster version of the intro music to a ScreamTracker 3 module: z66title.s3m. I chose S3M as it is the only other format I'm aware of that supports both OPL and sampled instruments at the same time.

Unfortunately for some reason the OPL instruments still sound a bit off - possibly due to the way the volumes are handled, but if anyone can pick exactly what the differences are do let me know!

I've only played it in ScreamTracker 3 in DOSBox and with Schism Tracker under Linux as these are the only two players I can find that support both OPL and PCM instruments, although Schism Tracker's OPL synth is a little inaccurate. Playing it with ModPlug only plays the PCM instruments (drum track) and AdPlug only plays the OPL part (melody) so the other players are the only way to hear the whole song as it (almost) sounds in-game.

But I'm pretty happy that finally I've been able to work out the Zone 66 music format

EDIT: Foreign Shores (shareware episode) seems to convert better: z66ep1.s3m

[evktalo]

Necroposting, but I just want to shout out encouragement and kudos for this work. I would've thought they just used the S3M format since it supports Adlib alongside samples, but perhaps it wasn't even available yet when making the game.