Some hopefully useful links…

I’m most glad to find this forum and see that there the task of identifying, extracting, converting and hunting down game scores is not only my obsession…! 🙂 I’ve been doing this for many moons, and over those years I’ve collected a lot of useful online resources that I know which hopefully will be new (and useful) to some…

– Xentax.com – home of the game resource extractor MultiEx Commander, as well as game resource forums and wiki, with hundreds of useful tips, links to other extractors/converters and format descriptions. A request place, too, although the older the game, the more difficult it usually is to figure it out… (I’m still waiting for some clues to surface somewhere as to the music formats used by Realms of the Haunting, Veil of Darkness and The Legacy, for instance… :))

– http://hammersound.com/cgi-bin/soundlink.pl – the Merlin Gold (merlin_gold.sf2 ) and the General User (GeneralUser.sf2) sound fonts: definitely the best sound fonts I’ve found for rendering MIDI and FM music to digital formats.

– Denis Oezmen’s resource extractors and converters – http://oezmen.eu/gameresources/ – they do what MultiEx, Dragon Unpacker and others often will not.

– FARManager.com – the Norton Commander for the 21st century 🙂 – armed with several game and proprietary file format plugins (from plugring.farmanager.com or ftp.elf.stuba.sk), it can also become a quick and efficient game resource extractor. (ftp.elf.stuba.sk contains some resource plugins for Windows/Total Commander, too)

– http://www.extractor.ru/download_index.phtml – one of (if not THE one) the biggest archives of game resource extractors and converters on the Net. The descriptions are in Russian, but the game titles are not. 🙂

– DOSBox – http://dosbox.cjb.net/ – I’m sure everyone knows it well, but just in case… For some time now, DOSBox has expanded with a wonderfully working option to capture MIDI and OPL commands from the games that it emulates, essentially making it possible to record any old game’s FM music as it’s played.

Thanks!

Wow, I mentioned "Realms of the Haunting" in the post… and who would have thought that I would actually find its score so quickly…! So, for anyone also interested in that game, it seems that someone managed to convert it to actual MIDI files – and it’s now here:
http://www.mirsoft.info/gmb/music_info.php?id_ele=MTM0Nzc=
(Another excellent site, by the way, with hundreds of mostly MIDI soundtracks from classic games)