"Ripping" is the art of extracting music from a game or demo, so you don't have to run it in order to hear the music; you can listen while browsing the web, playing solitaire, writing an essay, or whatever.
Most Amiga games and demos use very similar formats for music, and they're easy to rip with great programs like Exotic Ripper, ChipSaver, Pro-Wizard and Noiseconverter. However, as I collected all the low-hanging fruit, I moved on to the 'hard to rip' tunes, ones that need a disassembler just to find, ones that no automated tool can extract for me.
I was spurred on by reading a 'most wanted' list on a website called Hacked Amiga Music and thinking 'I can rip that!'. The reward? Well, the music firstly, but also major kudos!
You can find my rips at UnExoticA, a site dedicated to archiving all Amiga game and demo music, regardless of format.
Ripped!
- The Turrican 2 loader music (by Chris Hülsbeck) was my first "hard to rip" success.
- The First Samurai ingame music (by Nick Jones) was my next 'hard to rip' success.
- I ripped the Disposable Hero demo, after many years. Having followed through the multi-layered decrunching code, I eventual found music files, samples, and a replayer. I had recently learned how to recognize a "Protracker clone", so by comparing this with Protracker's replayer, I could work out how their formats differed and convert it back to Protracker
- Operation Stealth was a hard rip, but I created a script so anyone who owns the original game can also rip the music.
- The Stormlord ingame music (by Maniacs of Noise) was a really simple rip. However, the format of the music required the 'MON old' music player by Florian Vorberger. This has computer-crashing bugs in it, so I fixed these while I was at it, and also 'hacked' the rip so that people without the fixed player wouldn't have their computer crashing.
- I converted the F1GP title music from a custom (Dave Lowe) music format into a normal Protracker module. The important thing here was that I invented an automated converter that would print out the musical score in ProTracker style. One of these days I will develop this into a generic 'notescroller' program for a music player.
- I also ripped two encrypted mods by Anders Hamre from the AM-FM music disk.
To be ripped in future
- Roketz demo and full game (MED)
- SSI Eye of the Beholder 1 & 2 (SMUS with extensions)