Play old-school game music on your PSP and iPod

Like many sad people out there, I quite like the odd bit of retro game music in my collection, but don’t like having a zillion and one different players for different formats. To make matters worse, I don’t generally listen to this kind of stuff at home, I’d rather listen to it on the go on my PSP, an iPod or some other MP3 Player. What I need to do is convert these files to a common format that I could play on a portable system… hmmm…

Using this method, you can convert your mods, spc’s and other retro game system music formats into MP3s optimized according to the original system’s sound capabilities. I’m going to use the same method for two different games from two different systems, but this should work for pretty much anything.

Robocop was a very popular game on the Sinclair Spectrum in the late 80s. Everyone I knew (myself included) had a copy and despite the fact that for the most part it was almost as easy as Double Dragon, Robocop stood out for its music. The music from Robocop was then ported to the GameBoy version, which, bizarrely enough ended up being used in a TV advert for washing machine manufacturers Ariston. But, I digress. Let’s get whipping and crack on with the ripping!

In order to play the original music formats, you’re going to need to download a player called DeliPlayer. DeliPlayer is the bomb when it comes to playing mod, xm, and in our case, AY formatted music.

Once you’ve got your AY music ready (in our case, RoboCop from the worldofspectrum.org archives) then we’re good to go. Load the track into DeliPlayer and open up the StreamRecorder and StreamRecorder windows (right-click on the main screen -> Open Window).

The Spectrum uses a 3-channel mono AY sound chip, the same as the Amstrad CPC and is great for chip tune music, but not so great for anything else. The range is pretty narrow so you can get away with a low BitRate and mono mode. I keep the frequency at 44Khz as I have other things lying around that’ll play mp3s that get a bit narky with very low frequencies, although you should be able to get away with 32Khz quite easily (I haven’t tried it though).

On the dp2 Recorder window hit Record and choose somewhere to save it. DeliPlayer will only record mono. If you want stereo you’ll need to buy the Pro version. If you use the settings I use here, you should end up with a perfectly fine MP3 of just under 1.5mb. Not as good as playing it natively, but at least you don’t need a dedicated PSP AY player to play one AY song.

Ok, now on to our next track, the Turrican title theme from the Amiga classic. The Amiga has an 8-bit 4 channel stereo (2 channels per output) sound chip capable of 22050Hz on a good day with the wind behind it. The problem with Amiga music is that there are so many music formats out there. Turrican uses a format called TFMX. You can get .MOD (a common module format) versions of the soundtrack but these are generally re-implementations rather than conversions. Consequently, we’re going to have to fiddle a little to get this up and running.

Given that DeliPlayer only handles stereo in Pro mode, we’ll let this one convert in mono and save some space in the process. The settings should be the same as before, although you might want to set the maximum bitrate to 112kbps just to be sure as I’ve noticed this tune runs at about 102kbps in places. If all goes well you should get an MP3 of just under 3mb. You can of course go for something a lot smaller by reducing the bitrate, and the drop in quality isn’t significant until you get to below 64kbps, but if you’ve got a 1 Gb memory stick like me, that’s not too much of an issue.

Once you’ve got your MP3s ready to go, you can load them up into Winamp, iTunes or copy them across to your PSP or MP3 player directly. Now you can listen to infectious classic game music like the Rainbow Islands Theme tune wherever you are. The question is, what would you play on the move?