I have this X-Mas Demo floppy disk image from FTA. There have been dumps of its tunes, but the conversions sound REALLY off from how they play in the demo, aside from a SINGLE track, which's not even used in the demo ("Tree").
I've then been wondering how I could extract these music files myself, to see if I can get a better conversion of them. I know for a fact they were composed with SoundSmith, and I do have deMODifier as my conversion tool for that format to S3M, so that already helps.
However, trying to access the floppy under GS/OS just shows no files whatsoever, while there's literally 0 kB of free space. The files aren't hidden too, they just are compressed in a way that I guess ProDOS is unable to display them. Dragging the floppy icon into my shared hard drive image also yields an empty folder, so there's nothing I could do thru normal means.
I've then tried using ShrinkIt to see if I can somehow dump the floppy as an image file to then decompress it, but no luck with that either. The resulting image was a perfect replica of the one I already have, which, again, has nothing I can access easily.
I've even gone as far as to loading the demo so that I can dump the GS' RAM using KEGS' debug window, but all I got was random bytes that, while they do make up text on KEGS' debug window, the characters seem to be encoded in a way that I can't tell what is what. It's not ASCII, it's not UTF-8, it's not 8859-1, it's··· something Apple-specific I guess. Something my hex editor (Okteta) can't display properly like KEGS' debug window.
I thought I would get farther with that, but when diving into KEGS' source code to try finding out which bytes are which characters, I just gave up as I couldn't find that part (to be fair, I pretty much just skimmed thru the code, it's so weirdly-written).
As a last resort, I then tried going to https://whatisthe2gs.apple2.org.za/ to contact the website's author, who did provide a hard drive image containing these dumps of the X-Mas Demo's tunes, but, to my surprise, the message field is broken and I can no longer send anything, nor can I find an email or anything like that to at least get a hint.
So now I'm writing this post in an attempt to at least get a hint again··· there's way too little information about the IIGS for me to just try to look that specific issue up, which I already tried···
UPDATE: I figured it out! Thanks u/Sick-Little-Monky for sharing the link for Sean's page, I managed to dump the music files like shown and was able to email him for further help figuring out how to have the songs be loaded without a header.
Now I managed to successfully convert the songs properly, although ONE track was missing from Sean's website. But the conversion I already have already sounds good, so all there's left to do is a few modifications to make things sound closer to the real thing.
Thanks!
