Fixing Classical Cats: How I got tricked by 28-year-old defensive programming
mistys-internet.website
mistys-internet.website
The Director frame was 1/75 seconds? That’s a curious choice because it’s not divisible by 30 which was the most common playback rate.
Film-to-video transfers used a 3:2 pulldown pattern to render 24fps source footage onto 60Hz interlaced video. The exact same approach works for displaying 30fps content on Director’s 75fps display clock… But it’s hard to believe anyone loved 3:2 pulldown so much, they’d intentionally build it in.
Maybe it’s an artifact of the CRT era. I recall refresh rates in the 70-100Hz range were typical in Mac and Windows desktops before LCDs (60Hz on a tube is too flickery for office work). Perhaps 75Hz was a Mac standard in the early 1990s, and that’s where Director got it from.
Another theory: maybe the Director designers thought that 30fps video on a desktop CD-ROM was not realistic, and that content would be at 15fps max. Which has a nice 5x multiplier to the 75Hz internal clock.
eg https://flylib.com/books/en/4.258.1.47/1/
I agree 75 would be surprising and I like your speculations!
Now I wonder where the Audio CD 44.1k sample rate came from. 44,100 divided by 75 is 588 samples per channel. That doesn't seem like a particularly useful number, whereas 48k / 75 is a more appealing 640.
I've read enough of these emulation / reverse engineering blogs to know this will inevitably come back to haunt them.
> You can probably guess what Classical Cats does! Instead of working with tracks, it starts and stops playback based on absolute positions on a disc. This may sound strange, but it’s how the disc itself is set up
No, absolutely not strange. This is also the way to implement some type of interactive music for games (somewhat similar to iMuse) though seek times for 1-2x CD-ROMs aren't good for that
Yes it would be normal if the sound was just one long track, but that's not what's happening here
Having those separate tracks would be quite useful to someone who wants to listen to "Classical Cats" in an audio CD player. I'm guessing this was pretty common, and perhaps even the majority use case. Fans of the musician might try the novelty CD-ROM interface once, then go back to the familiar hi-fi player in the living room.
I am surprised that the scumm group did not just grab an existing disc container format like CHD (which I think is BSD3). They have solved most of these issues already.
I'd assume the issue was rather the game needing the space: the first few CD game generations took 50, 100, 200MB on the disc, so putting the OST in CD format was a nice easter egg. Note that games didn't generally put all sounds as CD tracks, just the actual music.
Once your game starts filling the CD, to say nothing of needing multiple CDs worth of storage, having the OST included is not an option anymore.
It wasn't an easter egg; it was how the games accessed and played the in-game music (and digitized speech when that was a new, exciting thing). There would be one huge data track and then dozens of small audio tracks. If the game did take multiple CDs, then either (a) you installed all the discs but all the audio was on the CD that had to be in the drive for the game to play or (b) each CD had the audio needed for the levels that were on that disc (I think that scenario was more common on PS1 games, but I could be mis-remembering)
Except they never had to do that, even before the MPs, they could always have stored the audio data as regular files on the disk image. Using CDDA just makes things more complicated as you need to reaccess the raw media instead of just reading the data from the filesystem.
Oh, listening to In Sides while shooting strogg? Maybe not a bad match. I don't think I can stomach this album anymore, though. I shouldn't have listened to it as much as I did back then.
It was about as novel as tuning my radio to a TV channel and listening to the Simpsons.
The format usually does not matter much - it might be even easier to rip files you have on your hard drive in some cases.
I had installed Half-life my first year of college, gone to one of those orientation concerts, gotten a free demo cd from the band, put it in my computer, and forgotten about it. Until the next time I played Half-life.
I haven't thought about that in years.
Some Steam games include MP3 copies of their soundtracks ready to copy to your music library. Other games include it as relatively cheap DLC. Steam has a Soundtracks tab in its Library that makes it easy to see which ones Steam knows you have access to and even includes a mini-media player.