XM to smps converter: released

I'm posting from work right now so I don't have much time.
Just wanted to say that this evening (MY italian evening, it's 1:12pm right now) I'm definitely going to attempt to release this thing to everyone. And as Tweaker said, it's not THAT unusable. Just, you need to know a few basic things, especially for the drums. And you have to pick a reasonable song for the conversion, don't expect a 32-channels XM to be converted flawlessy.

Anyways, I fail at naming things. Suggest me a name for this converter, or I'm going with "xm2smps". Actually, screw that. Xm2smps it is. Who needs creativity? We also have SonMapEd and RotSprite, good programs don't need a good name.

quick edit: I don't know if I'll manage to release anything tonight. It's being an hard day at work and I don't know when I can go home.

 

Double post because I'm releasing it. Yup guys, the converter is here. Of course this is way far from perfect right now, I wanted to work on this a bit more before the release, but the main features are there so there's no reason to wait.

What doesn't work right now:
Notes with a duration > 127 won't work (*)
Loops must begin at the start of the song (**)
There is no pan control at all (**)
You can't change the volume during the song (**)
All the XM effects (vibrato, arpeggio, pitch bends...) are being ignored (**½)
The optimizator is still rudimental (***)
You are still allowed to input weird values in some places, and the song gets broken (***)
Maybe something else, but I forgot

*: is going to be fixed soon
**: is maybe going to be fixed, but may need more time
***: low or no chance to get this feature working

Other generic underlined text so people don't think this is still the "what doesn't work" section
Download it here: http://digilander.iol.it/projectchaos/smps/xm2smps.exe

You'll need a binary file with the voices you wish to use, but I'm not including it for the download.

I'm eventually going to write a short guide for this, but not now, it's been an hard day at work. Actually, I'm probably going to be ultra busy for this whole week, big updates are probably going to arrive during the weekend. Of course I'm not already dropping the project, but my real life chose a bad time to get messed up. This is one of the reasons of this "earlier" release.

Have fun!

edit:
Just a quick note. I forgot to say that this tool creates dozens of temporary files during the conversion. They should be deleted automatically, but if for any reason you find a bunch of .tmp files you should delete them by hand before you run the converter again.

 

something.bin

Where "something" is the binary file you want to use. Like, if you want to try this song I just converted, you should type "Boys.bin".

Also, I just noticed that the Universal Voice Bank is lacking good strings. I should rip some good ones somewhere.

 

The voice bank must be a binary file with a collection of Genesis voices (the $19 bytes ones), and I'm not going to explain how to obtain that, check the SCHG guide.

Now, if you have a bunch of temporary files when the program closes, it means that some kind of error happened, I set it to keep them in case of failure for debug purposes, and I forgot to remove this "feature" in the released version. You have to delete them by hand before you run the converter again or it won't work. Also, the converter does explain what kind of error occurred, but if you have Windows set to auto-close ms-dos sessions when the program is done you won't manage to read that. To temporarily solve this problem you can either run the converter from a console window, or set Windows to keep sessions open as long as you don't close them.

I can't do anything for now because I'm posting from work, but when I get home this evening I'll make a quick fix in which I remove the debug feature that keeps the temporary files on errors, and I'll add a "Press enter to continue" thing to prevent the auto-closing of the dos session.

Oh shit the boss is coming here. Laters guys.

 

Another double post. But it seems that I have to do this.

Now the converter stays open until you press enter, and the temporary files are always deleted, even if you get an error.
Also, most of the "common" errors you can get are described properly so you can know what happened and how to fix it. Examples: you tried to use a channel for both drums and PSG, or you tried to load a wrong file, etc.
If for any reason you get a weird error (this should never happen, anyway), the program will give you two numbers. Report them to me so I can know what happened.

I didn't work on the features yet, this was just a very quick bugfix. Expect more news in the next days or something.

Oh, the link is the same. http://digilander.iol.it/projectchaos/smps/xm2smps.exe

 

Right, fixed. Thanks.

 

You know, as I told you via PM, I'm actually starting to think that I made an useless converter.