Backstory and Technical Notes: True Love Music Ripping Project     2020/06/18
Ami Sapphire


Way back in April 2003, Sis and I found this eroge game, True Love, on a now
defunct website that I no longer remember the name of. Somehow, we still have
that copy, though, not an exact one (earliest archive of it has a timestamped
year of 2004). We did want an archive of the music for the personal collection
of MIDIs that were slowly accumulating in a batch of numbered folders called
'The MIDI Music Folders'.

Fast-forward to July 12, 2003. I was messing with the program and thought: 'Hm,
wonder if the current MIDI from this game ends up in a temp file like another
program I got their MIDIs from?' then minimized the game and went to the
C:\Windows\Temp directory path. There it was: ADL.MID. Copied the file to the
desktop, exited the game, then played the resultant MIDI. Sure enough, that was
it. Quite simple.

Went to the sound test, played a track, ripped the file from C:\Windows\Temp,
renamed it as ADL1; repeated until I reached ADL15, as there were 15 songs.
Then I renamed them as shown in old-filenames.png, as the in-game title text
was a bit Engrishy to use as titles. Then... it was stuck in a folder called
MIDI Music Folder 40. It remained there until June 18, 2020.

--

Now: the MIDI soundtrack had already been released some time ago, but if I
recall, they weren't titled apart from numbering when I found a copy of it
(around 2009). My copy of the soundtrack labeling was based on the fact that
the game's Music Player was literally a sound system gimmick, so the filename
structure was Track n - p's Theme or Track n - m Theme. Yeah, I changed that
for the public release, but with a cleaner labeling structure: n - p.

--

From a technical standpoint, all MIDIs originally had been numbered M01.mid
to M15.mid and reside in the MIDI file archive. They also have some sysex data
that doesn't seem to actually get used, either. When the game requests a MIDI
file, it has to extract it from the MIDI file and dump it to a temp directory,
as they are not MIDI streams.

On DOS-based systems: C:\Windows\Temp
On earlier NT-based systems: C:\Documents and Settings\(user)\Application Data\
  Temp
On later NT-based systems: C:\Users\(user)\AppData\Local\Temp