Comment by bsimpson
1 day ago
I had the Mac version of Quake II.
They encoded the game as an audio CD, so you could toss the disc in a boombox and listen to the soundtrack when you weren't playing. Very cool!
1 day ago
I had the Mac version of Quake II.
They encoded the game as an audio CD, so you could toss the disc in a boombox and listen to the soundtrack when you weren't playing. Very cool!
This was actually just how CDDA music tracks worked in almost all CD games in the late 90s. :)
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2 got more play in my car than they ever did in my Playstation.
Same with my Wipeout 3 disc
HOLY SHIT THOSE SOUNDTRACKS WERE JUST CDS?!
THPS and Crazy Taxi had some of the best soundtracks ever compiled.
1 reply →
That was standard practice in the 90s. Track 1 on the CD is the data track, and subsequent tracks are standard CD audio tracks that happen to be played in the game.
If the game didn't require accessing data on the CD after installation, you could even swap the CD with a different album and listen to what you want.
Back then most common CPUs were 386 and 486DX - in real life they can't decode 44khz stereo mp3 file in realtime[1].
Only later Pentium 233mmx could handle mp3 decode in background + game (UT or Q3 Arena lets say).
[1]. Yes it is possible to play mp3 at 386SX 33mhz using magic with mplayer or mpg123(?) or (forgot the name) but it needs to be downgraded to 11khz, mono and other tricks.
CD audio track != mp3.
Either CD player would play audio itself (passed over analog audio connector), with the game occasionally changing track #. Zero CPU time.
Or a DMA controller would read digital audio from the CD, and CPU pass that on as-is to audio hardware. Lots of audio data streaming, but easy on the CPU.
The term for that is "Mixed Mode CD": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_Mode_CD
This was very common at the time. I suspect there was a technical reason, maybe freeing up the CPU and memory from dealing with music and offloading that to the CDROM drive.
It was just a standard way to play CD-quality audio tracks (by actually playing CD audio tracks!).
There's a reason you used to have a separate four-pin cable going from the CD drive to the sound card ;)
Due to the way computers cost a fortune back then, you could skip huge parts of hardware changes in the space of a few years. I must have skipped over that part and jumped from no CD audio (or CD-ROM at all) to, everything over IDE.
Never knew about the 4 pin link.
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Strictly speeking the was a seperate track with the game, the music was just in the native Audio CD format.
How many hours did you play when you found out you can dismiss the "computer updated" notification?
AKA redbook audio