Colin’s kindly allowed me to make the modules from Fred issues 41–82 available here. I’ve also included gamekarl.mod (as downloaded from the Mod Archive) which was included in the Mod Player demo in Fred 58.
A quick warning: the sizes of some of the modules don’t seem quite right. I’ll check the files more thoroughly some other time, but for now, don’t assume that the mods here are clean.
Several of the modules won’t work with most mod players. Colin Piggot tells me that this is because they were converted to use 4-bit samples (thanks, Colin!) which (AFAIK) only the SAM Mod player has support for. All of the files are available from the fred directory (these have been extracted straight from the Fred disk images at NVG. Original versions of the converted modules (downloaded from the Mod Archive, except for 2aa.mod, which took a bit more hunting) are in the orig directory.
I’ve converted the 4-bit modules back to 8-bit modules. Obviously the quality of the samples is not very good, so you’re better off playing the original module. This is only really of interest if you want to know how the 4-bit samples sound in comparison to 8-bit samples. You can get these from the conv directory, but I’d recommend against passing these around due to the poor quality of the samples.
The high nibbles of each byte make up the first half of the sample data - the low nibbles make up the other half. This is why you would hear some of the samples playing at the right frequency (although they’d be mixed with other samples playing quietly) and others would play as silence or whatever garbage was in memory at the time.
I’ve written a program, conv4-8.c, that converts modules with 4-bit samples to use 8-bit samples. It does this using a simple bit-shift... I expect that there are smarter ways of doing this, but it works. The program is perhaps a bit useless — you’re much more likely to want to convert the other way! I found modfil11.txt invaluable while writing this.
You can find a mod player for the SAM on Fred issues 41 (for the built-in SAA1099 sound-chip), 53 (for EDDAC) and 75 (everything). I would recommend the player in issue 75.
If anyone’s interested, here’s the evil kludge of a bash script that I used to extract the files. I’ll try to make samtools available when it’s ready, too.
Stuart Brady