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View topic - (OT) Skitchin VGZ to Midi

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  • Joined: 30 Apr 2006
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(OT) Skitchin VGZ to Midi
Post Posted: Sun Apr 30, 2006 1:50 am
Last edited by Zom-B on Sun Apr 30, 2006 10:27 am; edited 1 time in total
Hi there, i've been searching for months for a way to do this but no luck, hopefully your experienced community can help me. Here's the deal, i play guitar, me and my friends use Guitar Pro 5 and recently found out that you can import midi's and it will show you tabs. Thrilled we started downloading midi files from http://www.vgmusic.com/ and trying out songs from our favourite Mega Drive games, but we've never been able to learn the ones we love and crave to have: Skitchin. This game has the best rock music i've ever heard on a vintage console we'd love to get the tabs for the songs. Unfortunately i've only been able to find these .vgz files at this website: http://project2612.org/details.php?id=54 luckily winamp can play them so we can still listen to them at least. I did some research and found out that vgz files are compressed vgm files so i went hunting for a vgm to midi converter. I found one called "vgm2mid" at http://www.zophar.net/utilities/converters.html but it didn't convert the files properly, it just made midi's always 169b in size and empty.

So i'm begging for your help people, please help me and my friends get these brilliant tracks into midi format! Any help is greatly appreciated.. =]

Zom-B
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Post Posted: Sun Apr 30, 2006 6:51 am
When dealing with this software I find vgm2mid does not like VGZ files.

Use Maxims VGMTool to decompress the VGZ files into VGM files then try using vgm2mid again.

If not try an older version of vgm2mid as I reakon it runs smoother then the new .NET version.
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Post Posted: Sun Apr 30, 2006 10:24 am
Thanks for your help Jacko, with your information i've been able to convert some vgz files to vgm using the vgmtool you linked me to. Although, neither the vgm2mid or it's .NET version converts the vgm files, it does the same as it was doing for the vgz files, creating empty .mid files 169bytes in size.. Any ideas?
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Post Posted: Sun Apr 30, 2006 12:21 pm
Is it possible that the vgm2mid tool doesnt recognise the version 1.5 vgms with the megadrive specific compress routines?

You might like to try extracting gyms (an older format) using an emulator, and then find a gym2mid tool.

EDIT: Just saw that vgm2mid can covert gym files as well, so you should be alright if you can rip tunes as gym.
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Post Posted: Sun Apr 30, 2006 12:36 pm
Nice one, can you recommend any programs to rip music as gym files?
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Post Posted: Sun Apr 30, 2006 12:47 pm
Just off the top of my head, Gens, DGen and Genecyst can all rip gym format. I'd try them in that order. These are emulators, so you'll need the Skitchin' ROM as well.
The process goes roughly like this.
1. Run the emulator
2. Open the rom
3. Get to the sound test
4. Start GYM dump
5. Play the music
6. Stop Dump

The gym should end up in the emulators folder.
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Post Posted: Sun Apr 30, 2006 1:22 pm
I appreciate that very much and will keep that info in mind, but just as a made my post i stumbled across this : http://www.zophar.net/gym/skitchen.rar all those songs in gym format! They convert into Midi too, but guitar pro messes up the timing big time, i guess i'll have to try and fix that somehow, thanks for your help guys =]
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Post Posted: Mon May 01, 2006 12:06 am
If you have Sibelius try opening them in that, copy the guitar part to an empty document making sure when you set it up you use tempo markings and see how that goes.

If you like I can do this for you, just tell me the songs you would like and I will download the files, convert them and extract the guitar parts, pop them in a zip file then send them to you via E-Mail.
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Post Posted: Mon May 01, 2006 12:11 am
Well the one we really want is "Silken Liver Slipper" if you could do that for me i would be very thankful :D
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Post Posted: Mon May 01, 2006 4:35 am
The problem you may be running into is that most of the music in Skitchin' is recordings of guitar sounds, rather than synthesized guitar sounds. In most Genesis music tracks, the PCM channel (i.e. the channel that plays back actual recordings rather than synthesized sounds) is only used for drum tracks. Gym->MIDI converters count on being able to transcribe music commands sent to the synthesizer chip in the Genesis (YM2612) and convert it to MIDI commands. In the case of Skitchen', most of the guitar sounds are actual records of guitars, so the converter, which generally ignores PCM sounds, outputs little or none of the original soundtrack.

You're basically in the same boat as if you wanted to automatically transcribe a .wav or .mp3 recording of actual music as a guitar tab: the only real way to do it is to figure it out on your own, as there is no effect way to do that with software.
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Post Posted: Mon May 01, 2006 8:31 am
The original problem was because VGM2MID doesn't support the recent changes to the VGM format, which included a backwards (in)compatibility hack to make old tools think the file has no data in it.

As for the rest, yes, Heliophobe's right. Maybe consider recording it from Winamp with various channels turned off, then try to use some FFT analysis to get the notes (if not the chords)? At the very least, it'd allow you to check if the part you want is on the PCM channel.

I thought people usually made tabs by ear, anyway?
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Post Posted: Mon May 01, 2006 10:34 am
I'm not sure i understand.. listen to this midi that was converted from the gym :
http://ben.hostinglegends.co.uk/04SilkenLiverSlipper.mid
Then compare it to the actual gym :
http://ben.hostinglegends.co.uk/04SilkenLiverSlipper.gym
.. they sound very much alike to me, i can understand that the guitar sounds are recordings, but the midi is playing beep sounds in all the right places, it's just when i import it into Guitar Pro, it tries to sort the notes into a proper Guitar Tab layout.. what i'm asking is how can i edit the midi to cut it up into little parts so i can sort out the timing and tempo, also what instruments the tracks are playing on the midi because when i change them on Guitar Pro, they just stay as this:

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Post Posted: Mon May 01, 2006 1:41 pm
Yeah, I wish that VGM2MID would be updated. Before the new VGM version came out, it still had problems converting YM2612 VGMs. It would convert the first about 5 sec. properly and then just go nuts and play at about twice the normal speed.

Anyway, like they said, I would recommend converting from GYM. (That is the ONLY reason that I still have GYMs.) I use GYM2MID, and I get fairly accurate results. Hopefully, someone will be kind enough to fix VGM2MID in the near future. Until then, we are still relying on GYMs.
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Post Posted: Tue May 02, 2006 4:56 pm
Ah. I scrubbed through a few of the .gym's and only heard PCM guitar so I figured that was why you were getting a blank output file, but I guess there's more FM sound that I didn't hear. The explanation of the vgm2mid tool being out of date makes sense.
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vgm2mid
Post Posted: Thu May 04, 2006 7:49 am
Wow. I just came across this post (and another one related to vgm2mid) today. I haven't worked on vgm2mid extensively in a long time, although I've made some minor updates. The latest source is coded against .NET 2.0, in VB 2005. I'd be happy to share it with anybody who's interested.
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Post Posted: Thu May 04, 2006 3:49 pm
Here's the C source for a command-line tool that un-optimizes VGZ files from the new format:

unoptvgm.zip

A month or two ago Duke Nukem from Project 2612 wanted to un-optimize some of the new VGM files so he could run them through vgm2midi. I sent him this code but never heard back as to how it worked. I suppose it wouldn't be needed if vgm2midi is updated to support the new format (trivial, since it would be ignoring the PCM data anyway).
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Post Posted: Fri May 05, 2006 2:09 pm
Duke is unreliable sometimes... shoulda given it to me or Dimi. We would've gotten it to him in turn and bugged him about it incessantly until he did stuff with it. :p

P.S.: Come back to the IRC Channel, man! We miss you.
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Post Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 12:40 pm
Sorry about bumping such an old thread, but the link to unoptvgm.zip is broken, and google isn't being any help. Does anyone still have a working version of that, and if yes, could he/she upload it somewhere?

Thanks.
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bernard manilla
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Post Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2007 10:10 pm
Pu7o wrote
Sorry about bumping such an old thread, but the link to unoptvgm.zip is broken, and google isn't being any help. Does anyone still have a working version of that, and if yes, could he/she upload it somewhere?

Thanks.


please me too!
 
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Post Posted: Wed Oct 24, 2007 8:18 am
I think the "official" optvgm on Project2612 does "unoptvgm" too.

Also, this is OT. Project2612 is the place.
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Post Posted: Mon Dec 27, 2010 8:27 pm
Can you please to help me to find Tracks "Turbulence" and "Slitherin" from Dune: the battle for Arrakis in MIDI forat???
(Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaseeee)
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Post Posted: Mon Mar 07, 2016 11:11 pm
So has vgm2midi been updated now? Sorry for the late post.
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