Richard Joseph Player

[swirlythingy]

As I write, a 37MB zip archive is uploading to the AMP FTP... very slowly.

It's called rjp_conv/zip, and, as I promised, ooh, quite a while ago now, it contains conversions to S3M of all files I could find on UnExoticA of the RJP format.

Some brief notes, because I don't have much time:

Some subsongs may be junk.  I've just blindly ripped everything I could find and decided to leave the weeding to people who know what they're talking about.

Games included: Brutal/Crazy Football, Cannon Fodder/2, Chaos Engine/2/Demo, Diggers/Extractors, Flight of the Amazon Queen, James Pond 2/3/Aquatic Games, Mr Blobby, Rome AD 92, Ruff'n'Tumble, Sensible Golf, Sensible World of Soccer/95/96/Euro.

Some may be duplicates - see above.

I haven't tested as thoroughly as I should have done, so if it seems wrong, it probably is.  Please let me know about any mistakes!

I'll upload it to Modland as well when I get time.

[Crown]

Hi mate,

thanks for these inputs. I look forward to receiving the file. 

did you convert them one by one or was it an automated process?

cheers

[swirlythingy]

It finished uploading seven hours ago, so you should have it!

No, it was automated.  I take the view that if you have to manually alter anything, you've failed in writing a converter.

I suppose I might as well put the source code here, since it'll be some time before there's any kind of documentation... it's all in BBC BASIC, though!  (With no comments, because I'm terrible at commenting, except for the assembler bits.)

[Crown]

Great, i'll check that out. 

Thanks for sharing the documentation dude, much appreciated

cheerio

[Asle]

file won't be accessible until I come back from India, I guess.
Now the question, should we upload that on AMP ?
I propose to upload this as a separate package, in the download section.

Anyone, thoughts ?

Sylvain

[Crown]

I second you on that Asle. 

When do you get back btw?

[swirlythingy]

Version 2 is now on FTP!  Filename rjpconv2.zip, size 13,849,840 bytes.

It's much smaller than the last one because the main change is that I've removed all of the duplicates and junk that I could find.  I've also removed all the songs and subsongs which were just sound effects (e.g. most of Cannon Fodder, Sensible World of Soccer and Rome AD 92), although I could put them back if you want.  In total, there are 231 S3Ms.

If there's demand I'll put it on Modland as well, so everyone can listen to it.  (NB: The modules used are those from UnExoticA, as I found the Modland ones to be unreliable - the third world of the Chaos Engine had truncated sample data, and the Diggers song was from the CD32 version with half the subsongs missing!)

Source attached again.

Next I want to move all the technical improvements in this converter into a new version of my JPN converter, which now looks pretty pathetic in comparison.

[Asle]

this is outstanding stuff ! Well done !
And I'm sorry about the delay ... ok, I'll put all this online over the week-end (not Saturday as I'm at the office).

Sylvain

[Asle]

Hey,

 It's online now. in the download section. If anyone got a better idea, please share
 Thanks, Swirlythingy, for this outstanding conversion job !

Sylvain

[swirlythingy]

Wow.  Reading through my old posts, it seems I believed version 3 was close to completion back in September.  It's had - what, two major rewrites since then?

Yes, eight months is a pretty miserable amount of time to spend putting this archive together, isn't it?

Anyway, I have finally - finally! - uploaded what I sincerely hope will be the very last version to the AMP FTP.  Archive size 12,538,306 bytes.

I've changed a lot, and sometimes I changed my mind about changing things, and I decided it was finished about three times.  And it's also 4:00am, so excuse me if I have absolutely no clue why you should prefer this new archive to that old one.

I think the major changes are that it's now much more intelligent about writing sample data, and doesn't perform conversions where unnecessary, and it also tries to make the pattern lengths in the conversion line up as much as possible as those in the original data (you'll have noticed that there used to be a lot of patterns which start in the middle of a phrase).

An unnecessary sample conversion is one where there's a more or less 1:1 mapping between the RJP sample info and the S3M equivalent (say, a reasonably straightforward snare drum), which means the original data can just be written straight in without having to 'record' it, losing quality.  As a result, some tunes (try FotAQ-12-02) are now noticeably higher quality, as well as smaller in file size, than before.

And there's loads of miscellaneous stuff too.  In the previous version I recorded some samples at half quality because I thought they played so low you wouldn't be able to tell the difference, but it turned out you could, so now everything's in high quality.  Unfortunately that caused all the file sizes to near-double, hence all the time I've been spending trying to optimise the conversions by other means.  I've also got a little doohickey which detects sample which are identical in all but volume, preventing duplication of sample data.

But the real reason the archive's a megabyte smaller is that I cheated and deleted a load of songs which were either duplicates (a lot of Chaos Engine music) or dull (Diggers ingame music - well, that's my excuse, the real reason was that I couldn't get the S3M format to play nicely with the newly astronomical file size).  There are now 209 S3Ms.

In summary: higher quality (maybe), more accurate conversions (possibly), smaller file sizes (in some exceptional cases).

Please don't hate me.

Source attached.  I know how you all love reading that stuff.

[Asle]

Heh, file is on the FTP (overlooked it) and will be made available tonight.
Thanks

Update : it's now on-line, available in the download section (~12Mb).

Huge thanks again. I listened to a few chosen ones and they really sounded wonderful . Nice job !

[Crown]

You really are gifted swirlythingy.