DWIs and OF 4.9.9

[lomdr]

For those that want help with deleting batches of .DWI files in song folders that have both DWIs and SMs, here's some tips for Windows (Those that use Apple systems or Linux, feel free to chime in with how you would do so in those OSes)

Pretty much, search for .DWI in the group folder that you want to delete said files from (T7R 1st Mix, for example). However, some song makers way back in the Tournamix Era made the .SMs to be their edit file. You can tell with HF2 that you would get less difficulties than you'd think you would get (Winter from TM3 and Redraw Lots from TM4). In those cases, you're better off writing down that song's offset in the SM file or the Editor, delete the SM file, reload your cache, then redo the song in the Editor with the DWI file (using the Offset that you got from the old SM file) and save the song, making a SM and SSC file. You can do the same thing if you know that songs come with both SM and SSC files if you want one file type over the other (SM or SSC).

[lomdr]

Also, as for .DWI support: Most everything is supported but there are some oddities due to how DWI implemented skins and exclusive features:
Since the simfile maker was expected to support non-english/latin characters instead of the skinner, the maker had to use the Display Title/Artist fields to put in the special characters and then make said characters themselves with the word "Char" somewhere in the filename. You could put multiple characters in the same Char file as long as they were 'adjacent'. However, even as far back as 3.9 SM/OF would sometimes parse the extra characters as a CDTitle instead. Sadly, the 'best way' around it is to only read the SongTitle and SongArtist fields for DWI files and hope that the DWI maker is still active to update their files to SM and/or SSC.

DWI supported Multi-genres while SM doesn't. The way that DWI did it was to put a comma between each genre in the genre tag. The reason why DWI did it is because "DDR 4th Mix had grouping by Genre and some songs appeared in multiple genres". It was a pretty inexpensive way to have 1 song appear in multiple DDR Mixes (Such as having Monkey Punk appearing in Ultramix 2, DDR STR!KE, and DDR SuperNOVA AC) thanks to smaller drives way back then. Since 3.9 and above does not care about multi-genres, any theme that shows genres will show the full genre tag (Monkey Punk's Genre in Soundwaves, if it was using DWI's multi-tagging feature, would show "DDR Ultramix 2, DDR STR!KE, DDR SuperNOVA AC"). At least, that is current behavior, as I remember a tagging system being worked on for Alpha 5. Once the tagging system is implemented, assuming that DWI support is still around, the Genre field in .dwi files can be used for the tagging system.

The biggest concern is the background system in DWIs, which had multi-layers thanks to it using Pre-DDR MAX paradigms. Since SM doesn't support layering (or if it does, does it in a completely different way that DWI did it), it could lead to hangs or crashes with .dwi files with video/animation calls. The only way to fix this is to delete the background layers in the DWI file. The only DWI file that comes to mind that has it is Super Mario Bros Dirty Mix from DDREI Tournamix 4 or some other Tournamix 4 or 5 files.

Weirdly, (at least in 4.9.10 as it was when I noticed the cause of), if the song folder does have a DWI file with NO bgchange script, it will override the SM file's bgchange script after the first 4 measure random BG change. The old version of STOP from NDDRO's DDRMAX 3 had a DWI file with the SM file and that bug is present. Meanwhile, the version of STOP from DDRMAX3 Plus does NOT have a DWI file and thus plays the song fine. The only solution is to delete the DWI files in songs with BG Change scripts

This was made as a separate post as it handled a tangential topic to the OP