POKEY2MIDI
POKEY2MIDI is a tool (using Python 3) to convert POKEY register dumps from Atari SAP files into MIDI music files. (It cannot convert SAP files directly into MIDI files.)
The main motivation for writing this program was for me to transcribe Atari SAP music as MIDI, to be later imported in other music composition programs. I wanted this to try my hand at orchestrating some Atari music. You can hear some examples here.
As such, I needed a tool that was accurate, and which also separated potential instruments/voices and aligned MIDI notes to the musical bars. This makes POKEY2MIDI's approach to transcribing MIDI files different than other "video game music" MIDI converters: slides are not translated to pitch bends, but as note retriggers.
Features
POKEY2MIDI has many options you can toggle on or off to customize the output. These include:
- Can merge decaying notes as a single MIDI note. Volume information may also be ignored completely to extract only the note transitions.
- Maps POKEY channel volume either to note velocity (loudness of each note) or MIDI channel volume.
- Splits notes per channel of each POKEY, or even per poly per channel per POKEY. This allows you to easily pick apart the different "voices" and instrumentation used in the music.
- Trims initial silence so notes are aligned to MIDI bars.
- Maps MIDI instruments to each poly setting, or just leave it unmapped.
- No pitch bend, because pitch bends suck! It only makes it more difficult for transcribing.
- Boosts loudness of notes.
- Save MIDIs with a specific max duration.
- Use a known song tempo to precisely align MIDI events to the bars, making the transcription more useful to use elsewhere. Doesn't affect playback/perceptual speed, but it won't work for tracks that change tempo or use some irregular timing structure.
- Also includes a simple (but usually effective) algorithm to detect the precise tempo of songs. Many possibilities are suggested, and one of them is usually right. It's often easy to tell which one, especially if used in conjunction with a tap-based bpm detector.
Noise and special effects (highpass filters) are not yet handled, but will be included at some point. The idea is to map noises into percussions eventually.
Instructions
POKEY register dumps can be created from Atari SAP files by using asapscan, available on the ASAP project (http://asap.sourceforge.net).
Just run asapscan with the -d command, and save the contents into a text file. Like so:
asapscan -s N -d song.sap > song.txt
Where N is the subsong number (starting from 0), if any. Otherwise, this setting can be omitted. The above should work on both Windows and Linux.
Once the text file is ready, just run POKEY2MIDI on it as per instructions (see "Command line parameters" below).
POKEY2MIDI also accepts bzip2-compressed text files, but that's not necessary. I just added that support so the repository wouldn't be large because of huge text dumps. :P
Command line parameters
usage: pokey2midi.py [-h] [--all] [--notrim] [--nosplit] [--nomerge]
[--usevol] [--useinst] [--short]
[--setinst n,n,n,n,n,n,n,n] [--boost factor]
[--maxtime time] [--bpm BPM] [--findbpm]
[--timebase TIMEBASE]
input_file [output_file]
positional arguments:
input_file Input POKEY dump text file.
output_file MIDI output file. If not specified, will output to the
same path, with a '.mid' extension
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--all Use all notes by always retriggering. Useful for when
notes are being missed. Overrides note merging.
--notrim Do not trim initial silence, which happens by default.
--nosplit Do not split different polynomial counter settings for
channels as separate instrument tracks, which happens
by default.
--nomerge Do not merge volume decays into a single MIDI note,
which happens by default. Ignored if --all is used.
--usevol Use MIDI channel volume instead of note velocity. This
is similar to how it happens in the actual chip.
--pitchonly Completely ignores note volume information, and considers
only pitch changes when triggering notes. This is similar
to --usevol, but the MIDI file will contain no channel
volume MIDI messages.
--useinst Assign predefined MIDI instruments to emulate the
original POKEY sound. Also use --setinst if you wish
to define different instruments yourself.
--shortnotes Assigns notes shorter than 1/k-th of a beat to separate
channels. Useful for cleaning up certain songs, but may
map certain notes to MIDI percussion (channel 10)
--shortnames Use shorter MIDI track names.
--setinst n,n,n,n,n,n,n,n
Specify which General MIDI instruments to assign to
each of the 8 poly settings. No spaces, n from 0 to
127. The last three are the most important for melody
and default to: square wave=80, brass+lead=87, square
wave=80.
--boost factor Multiply note velocities by a factor. Useful if MIDI
is too quiet. Use a large number (> 16) to make all
notes have the same max loudness (useful for killing
off POKEY effects that don't translate well to MIDI).
--maxtime time By default, asapscan dumps 15 minutes (!) of POKEY
data. Use this to ignore stuff after some point.
--bpm BPM Assume a given tempo in beats per minute (bpm), as
precisely as you want. Default is 60. If the song's
bpm is known precisely, this option makes the MIDI
notes align with the beats, which makes using the MIDI
in other places much easier. Doesn't work if the song
has a dynamic tempo.
--findbpm Attempts to post-process the data to automatically
detect tempo/bpm by using a simple algorithm. The best
guesses are merely displayed after the conversion. Run
again with one of these guesses as a parameter with
--bpm to see if events aligned properly. Cannot be
used with --all, but might work better with --usevol.
--timebase TIMEBASE Force a given MIDI timebase, the number of ticks in a
beat (quarter note). Default is 480.
Samples
Sample MIDI outputs are given in the samples directory, along with the dumps and original SAP files for comparison.
The samples were created using the --useinst and --usevol setting, which results in MIDIs resembling the originals more closely. Check them out and compare with the originals!
Notes
This is a work in progress, and some POKEY features are still not properly handled. In particular, I haven't yet figured a good and comprehensive way of dealing with the 0-4 (000 to 010) AUDC polynomial settings, which are used to produce various types of noise.
The white/pink-noise-like polys 1=001 and 4=100 are being ignored for now. Polys 0=000, 2=010 and 3=011 all produce tones at high enough frequencies, but are almost always used for low rumbling sound effects. I'm still figuring out what to do with these.
Some note frequencies are also not being mapped properly to anything useful, especially when songs use 16-bit or the 1.79 MHz clock. I opted to omit these for now until I figure what to do as well.
Atari SAP Music Archive (ASMA) conversion to MIDI
With many thanks to Konrad "Gades" Leśniak, the Atari SAP Music Archive (up to November 16 2020) has been converted using POKEY2MIDI! Most of the tracks were converted with the proper BPM correction, so their notes should be aligned to the musical bars. This full archive can be downloaded here: https://atarionline.pl/pliki/gades_asma_38_mid2.zip
For more information and details on how this was achieved, see:
Note that these conversions have used the default parameters for POKEY2MIDI, which may not be exactly ideal for a specific SAP file, or not the kind of MIDI file you wanted. It seems subsongs were converted as well, but appear concatenated in the same file. I am unsure how this changes the BPM alignments, but hopefully, this archive will cover 90% of cases. :)
Some tags to help others looking for this program: pokey2mid, sap2mid, sap2midi, POKEY to MID, SAP to MIDI, SAP to MID