Protracker 2 Transfer utility

Last night I had a quick attempt at using it to transfer Think Twice (III) and failed. The samples were all playable and the patterns were recognized. The saved file (approx 90K) looked like it contained converted pattern data, but Protracker 2 refused to recognize it as a loadable module.

What I found was the format of the disk you save the converted mod to seems to matter. If you save it to the included data disk, it will be seen in the file select in Pro-tracker, but if you save it to another disk, it didn't show up. Haven't spent any time figuring out what the disk format needs to be, (it was just that I noticed Protracker wasn't showing even the included Protracker songs if they were copied to another disk, so thought I'd check with a MOD transfer too which had the same behaviour).

Been trying to look into this a bit more, and it looks to me like the Protracker program adds some non-standard info to the directory entry for each file it saves. This is why when transferring files from another disk, they don't seem to show up. I confirmed this by manually changing/editing the directory part of the disk image (using SCADM to look at Track 0) for files that weren't showing up, and after changing they then appear. The program seems to look for '170 253' at the end of a directory entry to indicate a Protracker module (and '170 254' for samples). Means you wouldn't see any issues for files you create yourself with Protracker, but trying to copy files from elsewhere or to another disk doesn't then show up as this non-standard data isn't copied. Maybe this was added after the transfer program was originally done (could also be something to do with copy protection maybe). I don't know if there is a way for DOS to copy the directory entry data at the same time as the file itself? I'm not sure on this aspect at all really, and havn't tested whether Protracker has modified DOS for copying files - been using SCADM for this purpose.

I must have gotten lucky when copying files over previously, it did seem a bit hit and miss whether they worked, maybe it came down to which directory entry they replaced and if non-standard data was already there.

Anyway, seems to need a manual intervention on the directory entry to get files generated by the Transfer utility actually to appear in Protracker. While it is handy for Protracker to show you the right files when loading (module, sample etc.) its a shame it seems to have resulted in the transfer utility then not producing easily usable files.

I can see it assumes 4 channel mods only, I've generally been been using OpenMPT on my PC to save any mods in a 4-channel, Amiga compatible Protracker format, and these seem to convert fine.