[Pengwin]

The whole Unreal series and the engine it spawned were, and still are something i love to just look at.

I remember going through the file system as a kid and looking at all the nicely arranged but weird files in Unreal Tournament. I liked the music from the game and wanted to play it, but i didn't know what the weird UMX file was, but i knew it was music thanks to being placed in the Music directory (A nice change to Quake 3 where all i found was a giant PAK file). A Google search and a winamp plugin later and i could play it. Looking at the winamp plugin i realized that it was not like an MP3 or wave with everything baked in but more like a midi, there was a whole UI in the plugin which displayed the instruments and timeline of the song being played. It was a really fun thing to learn about on top of instagib matches on Deck16.

Looking it up now i see that Alexander Brandon is the composer of Go Down, the music for Deck16. I guess ill have to go and find a nice source of the music from UT and have another listen. It'll be nearly impossible to deal with a UMX file these days!

[dfox]

.umx is nothing more than renamed Scream Tracker or Impulse Tracker module (.s3m/.it), so playing it just requires getting module player, mikmod is modern, still maintained and portable implementation, which can be used directly as player and is used in many open source media players.

[coroxout]

And if you want to edit them or look at the pattern/sample data, I recommend Schism Tracker, a modern open-source clone (with new features) of Impulse Tracker.

http://schismtracker.org/

I too have fond memories of going through all the directories for games and demos looking for cool stuff (graphics and sound files). Nostalgic shout-out to "Jonas' Mega Ripper", a tool which would go through data files and executables looking for image/sound chunks and save them to separate files.

[Ralfp]

> I guess ill have to go and find a nice source of the music from UT and have another listen.

It's all on youtube these days. I'm loving Unreal's ambients for programming work.

[rocky1138]

Save yourself the bandwidth and get them in higher quality off modarchive :)

http://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_artist_modules&...

[Lorin]

Modarchive is such a treasure trove of great music... great to see it being referenced on HN :)

[Pengwin]

it looks like there is a umx decoder (libmodplug) in ffmpeg actually, and i have the games on steam. Maybe i'll convert them to mp3 myself for a trip down memory lane.

speaking of changing formats, Unreal Tournament 2004 was the first place i saw an Ogg file too.

[grrowl]

Quake3's PAK (.pk3) files were actually .zip files -- renaming them would let you extract them (in WinZip trial version, probably)