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Does anyone know of a media player or plugin for any freeware/standard media player that can play SGT files?

Context:
I've been playing La-Mulana lately. It's a quite difficult freeware castletroid (the no-mistakes-or-you-die-to-traps-in-the-dungeon type), and it has an awesome soundtrack.

I got the "official" soundtrack, but it's in the format of advanced MIDI or something, not the same as the in-game 8-bit-/16-bit-style instrumentation. (Also, a few of the tracks are in different keys.) The in-game soundtrack, though, is represented by the LA-MULANA\music\ folder, and contains three files for every track, as follows:

mXY.mid
mXY.sgt
mXY_h.mid

where XY is the two-digit number of the track. The game has alternative music, where you can use your own MIDI player (mine sucks and makes a mess of them) to play the provided MIDIs, but its default isn't MIDI, it's something that sounds videogame-ish. I suspect those tracks are the SGT files.

But I need a way to play these SGT files. The only SGT-playing thing that I found on the internet is a Winamp plugin for playing SGT files from FFVIII...but I tried it, and it doesn't work here.

Does anyone know what can play these SGT files--with an infinite loop, preferably?

Edit

From the La-Mulana manual:

Quote

La Mulana has two music modes. The first is an SSC-like basic mode. The second will only work if you have external hardware equal to or better than a Roland SC-88, but is an arranged MIDI mode. Pick whichever you prefer.

It's the "SSC-like basic mode" music that I'm going after here. (I don't know what SSC stands for.)

This post has been edited by Glenn Magus Harvey on 21st April 2007 20:04

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Check the "What games are you playing at the moment?" thread for updates on what I've been playing.

You can find me on the Fediverse! I use Mastodon, where I am @[email protected] ( https://sakurajima.moe/@glennmagusharvey )

Sometimes games will purposefully alter file formats to prevent others from simply opening them with a commonly-available program. This could be the case. For instance, they may add a "fake" header that tells the program "zomg b0rken!!" and when loading the file, read past that header to the real header and shoot that off to the music engine instead. Or maybe simply hardcode the header through the game. Many things are possible.

SGT files are to be played via DirectX, more specifically DirectMusic, one of the DirectX interfaces. A real SGT file begins with "RIFF" (0x52 0x49 0x46 0x46) Starting at offset 6, you can also find the string "[0x00][0x00]DMSGsegh(" If the file doesn't contain those, it's not a "real" SGT file.

These files are created via DirectMusic Producer, a program bundled with the DirectX SDK. You can grab it here. If you find that the files do not match the above criteria, playing them will be impossible without knowing how the game loads them and what data is added/suppressed/altered before it gets sent off to DirectMusic.

This post has been edited by Silverlance on 21st April 2007 20:58

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Turns out, it works. I also have a hunch that they produced the MIDI versions and the soundtrack versions with this program.

Problem is, though...the instruments are all wrong. I don't know how to change the instruments to make them sound videogame-ish, or whether my MIDI instrument sets even have the videogame-ish-type instruments that are used for playing the SGT files in-game. My best idea would probably be to ask the developers to create a custom program for playing the files with the in-game instruments...

...but not like I've even barely had any contact with the game, much less with the developers themselves. And I don't seem to have heard of them having some kind of blog (I may very well be wrong), unlike Studio Pixel.

The developers are GR3 Project, in case you're wondering.

--------------------

Check the "What games are you playing at the moment?" thread for updates on what I've been playing.

You can find me on the Fediverse! I use Mastodon, where I am @[email protected] ( https://sakurajima.moe/@glennmagusharvey )

I have pretty much no experience with that file format, but sometimes games keep music data and instrument data seperate. If you could send me one such file along with any other files that would seemingly be associated (for instance, song_01.xyz or whatnot) I can give it a shot and see if there's some way to get the instruments, but I doubt I'd have any more success than you.

Aside from that you could try getting in touch with the developpers, yes. Asking them for a means of playing the music outside the game wouldn't hurt - you've got nothing to lose. In a worse-case scenario they'll be ass-hats who'll tell you to go and get lost - on the internet, that's pretty much meaningless. You'll just lose the time it takes to write them an email and read their reply.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."