Mod Reader v000 launched!

It’s here, the thing I’ve been working on for more than a month of countless nights. It’s a PHP mod file reader and it works bloody great!

The project started when I was thinking about hosting my old mod collection so that others could enjoy it. I wanted to make it a bit more informative than a directory listing though. I wanted to display the song title from inside the file, channels and file size.

After reading up on the mod file format and opening my mind to new concepts, I did just that. I created a nice little php script that could open and parse the mod file format and return the info I wanted. But wait… there was more goodies buried in the format. Things like the sample list which frequently contains messages from the author plus there was the holy grail, estimating the song length.

I kept working on more features each night, after a bit I was able to read the sample list messages, sample size, loop info and more. Things were going really well and I was learning a lot of new programming skills reading through these binary files. I decided that I would try to loop through all the pattern data and figure out how long each song is. What a quest it would be.

I started our reading the first note position then move on to different channels, rows and then finally patterns. I kept adding new functionality each night. An order reader, recording speed/bpm changes, delay effects, order jumps, pattern jumps and eventually odd song loops. It took me countless hours of work and quite a few major code changes along the way. Each problem brought with it more puzzles and eventual enlightenment when I figured out what was going on.

I can truly say I feel more like a programmer now more than ever. I’ve taken my lust for knowledge applied to to my beloved music collection and learned a lot of stuff along the way. I feel one step closer to my ultimate dream of becoming a video game programmer. I don’t know how long it will take or if I’ll even be successful but I know I’ll enjoy the quest and I will make a video game one day.

So without further ado please check out the new Music section which contains over 200 mod songs. Enjoy!