[awhitby]

I would guess the CHT files are commands for text output on a dot matrix printer, or a format pretty close to that.

* The MARLEY songs are laid out in two columns (side A, side B) from left to right then top to bottom, which suggests its pretty close to a matrix of characters, rather than something more abstract/structured.

* Every character is taking up two bytes, which could be some Slovenian encoding but I doubt any European language was taking up 16 bits in the early 1990s, which makes me think every second character is a formatting for the character that precedes or follows it.

* The MARLEY title has a repetitions like "BBoobb MMaarrlleeyy" which might be the kind of overprint mode I remember dot matrixes having, where the printer prints a character then goes back and reprints it, to get a bold effect.

I would dig around for old dot matrix standards, Epson and so on.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

I think you nailed it re overprinting.