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Comment by MattHeard | Hacker News Reader

Barely related, but I remember the joy as a kid of putting a computer game CD-ROM in my Walkman CD player just to see what happens and discovering that I could listen to the game's soundtrack just like a normal soundtrack CD. Can't remember which game, but it is a fond memory of mixed-mode CD technology. Can't do that with your Steam games and Spotify!

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As a corollary: if you had installed the full game to your hard drive, and put a music CD in your CD-ROM drive, you might be surprised to find the soundtrack of your game was something other than what you expected it to be!

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 accidentally did that with the original Team Fortress on Quake, and the Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries CD. I always felt like the track from that CD that went with the `rock` map was a good match, but I couldn't really say why.

I haven't thought about that in years.

My brother and I were ecstatic when we found the "hidden" track on the Warcraft 2 Beyond the Dark Portal expansion pack CD called "I'm a Medieval Man"

I did this with some Playstation games too. The data track never sounded very good.

Both Total Annihilation and Outlaws had real bangers

I remember the two CDs of TA having different music and getting mad about that because the song I wanted to listen to wasn’t on the CD I had in

Yes! They used a full orchestra for it

Was it Quake? I used to listen to that game CD in my CD player at work, back in the late '90s.

Many games of that era have this. Usually the first track was the data, everything after was just normal cd audio data. I noticed it with most of my tg16 cd games and a few ps games. Once ogg and mp3 became a thing that sort of went away. Instead of 10-15 tracks you could have several hundred in the same space with similar quality in audio.

> Once ogg and mp3 became a thing that sort of went away.

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.

>so putting the OST in CD format was a nice easter egg.

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)

> It wasn't an easter egg; it was how the games accessed and played the in-game music

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.

In those days CD drives could output the audio as analog or digital signals separately from the data bus, using a cable that connected directly to the sound card for zero-overhead music. Commodity CD drives on the PC go back to about 1992 and playing CD audio would have been prohibitive overhead for contemporary CPUs

It was quite surprising for me when I found music from the CD drive kept playing after I shut down Windows 95.

It really wasn't so much ogg and mp3. But the fact that systems got powerful enough to run both games alone rather complex task and also decode the music. We often forget just how slow systems in early nineties were.

Quake 2 was beautiful set to Orbital's In Sides.

What do you mean?

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.

Yeah, it had this amazing habit of reaching the transition in "Adnan's' right as you came into a large open space, things like that. Memory is a little rusty from 1997 but I preferred it to the Reznor tracks, despite being a big NIN fan.

Command and Conquer did it too, if I recall

Yup. Did this with Warcraft 1,2,XP, Cosmic Osmo, Half Life, many others.

It was about as novel as tuning my radio to a TV channel and listening to the Simpsons.

Warcraft II was the one I discovered this on! It was extreme joy finding that!

There is (was?) whole community around ripping games (extracting sounds, sprites and other resources) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripping.

The format usually does not matter much - it might be even easier to rip files you have on your hard drive in some cases.

The original GTA had this, it was a really great original soundtrack. Probably had as much to do with the series’ original success!

> Can't do that with your Steam games

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.

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