Martin has spent several years gaining expertise in first ripping the original music files from games and demos (surmounting compression, encryption, obfuscation, and what have you), and latterly in converting these original files from their often unique or esoteric formats into files which can be played in the desktop via DigitalCD.

In this combined presentation, demonstration and concert, he hopes to demonstrate some of the techniques he has used to achieve this, talk about how he developed them, and share some anecdotes about the weirder things he has discovered while traversing binary land, and the frankly peculiar things which happen when music players are written by people who know nothing about music players.

While everything is subject to change at short notice and the inevitable compatibility gotchas arising from running twenty-year-old software on a ten-year-old computer, it is hoped that music will be played (and in some cases ripped live) from at least the following games and demos:

Some previous work on this subject has been released under the name "Music Ripper's Toolkit", but the last public release of that is very old and a lot of new work, such as SWIV and Phaethon, will be making its public debut at this talk - you can't download anything anywhere, and probably won't be able to for a while. Be sure to come along if you want a slice of the nostalgic 1990s tracker-based action!

The Music Ripper's Toolkit can be downloaded from here.