No music in BZ1.5 / Windows 7

[NoelShourai]

Hi,

I have both a physical disk and an image of BattleZone 1, with CD audio on both. CD audio can be read and play properly in foobar2000, Windows Media Player, etc.. I have already tried swapping the CD drive letters between both my physical drive and my virtual drive, as indicated in this particular thread, but I cannot seem to get any music to play in-game at all. Everything else seems to work fine (surprisingly), just not music.

System Specs:
Intel Core 2 Duo CPU @ 2.53 GHz
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
nVidia GeForce 9800 GT

I am running a fresh install of BattleZone 1.5, and I have no other severe or noticeable problems beyond maybe the occasional black menu screen.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Dx.]

Ok 1.5 is in beta so i moved it to Ken's forum so he can see it.

[hitchcockgreen]

When you mount the CD image, do you mount the .BIN or the .CUE file?

Or are you using some other format?
What was the CD image created with?

In order for the original CD image to be "pure" it has to be in bin/cue format to maintain the music AND data partitions.

To the best of my knowledge, other image formats won't work.

[NoelShourai]

It's a bin/cue.

I mount the .CUE file using DaemonTools. Both music and data are present, as I can access the game data in Explorer--and music plays fine if I have either foobar or WMP play it as an Audio CD.

[hitchcockgreen]

Hmmm. You got me there. I'll have to test some things maybe but my original CD is at work.

What drive letter do you have it mounted on?

[NoelShourai]

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I have a BluRay drive; though I'm not sure if it makes much of a difference.

Currently, my drive layout looks like this:

Code: Select all

C: D: E: F: - Hard drive partitions
H: - External storage

G: - Physical BD-ROM Drive
I: - Virtual BD-ROM Drive

BattleZone 1 is installed on the D: drive.

By default, my G: drive is the BD-ROM drive, and the I: drive is the virtual drive set up by DaemonTools. If I follow the instructions mentioned in the Battlezone1.org link, I basically swap the G: and I: drives around.

[Ultraken]

I have a similar setup with a virtual drive (MagicDisc) and a UIF of the BZ disc so I'll give this a try. I suspect the game looks at the first drive it finds and stops there.

Update: I found some example code for opening a CD audio device and replaced the overly-complex setup code in CDInit. I now have music playing from the virtual CD that I haven't heard in years.

[hitchcockgreen]

Nice job, Ken. Update this weekend then?

It'll be nice to get music without having to tinker with drive letters.

I know both of my PC setups have CD/DVD down the list, with multiiple/RAID configurations taking up the first few letters.

[Ultraken]

That's the plan.

[hitchcockgreen]

Update: I found some example code for opening a CD audio device and replaced the overly-complex setup code in CDInit. I now have music playing from the virtual CD that I haven't heard in years.

How much more complex would it be to have it read a directory of MP3 files rather than a CD?

[Ultraken]

Unfortunately, that's a lot more involved than using the Windows Media Control Interface to play back CD audio.

[Dx.]

I play the tracks.mp3 through IE8 but don't know how to do it in firefox.
Probably just need for the engine to look for the files and start it, let the browser handle the rest.

[Ultraken]

Opening music files with ShellExecute would play them in the default music player, though I'd rather do it right than loose that kind of abomination on the world.

[NoelShourai]

Don't know if this should go in the new build thread or the thread I made.

I tried the new 2011-06-19 build, but I don't notice anything different. Music still doesn't play on either drive.

[Dx.]

Are you sure the cd check isn't too disabled Ken? (not finding the cd at all)

[Ultraken]

My audio mixer stuff caused all kinds of problems so I reverted it. The CD playback itself works, but some people have it playing at zero volume.

[NoelShourai]

Tried the 2011-06-26 build, music still doesn't play on either drive.

Is it really a problem with BZ1.5 itself or is it some external problem outside of the game (i.e. Windows 7, etc.) that I haven't found?

[hitchcockgreen]

Tried the 2011-06-26 build, music still doesn't play on either drive.

Is it really a problem with BZ1.5 itself or is it some external problem outside of the game (i.e. Windows 7, etc.) that I haven't found?

I don't know if it would be anything Windows 7-specific, since I think a majority of testers may be using Win7. It could, however, be something specific to your installation or hardware based.

I'm wondering if foobar has a service running in the background that might be hijacking audio playback?

[Ded10c]

We use Foobar in our music tech labs for the fact that it *doesn't* hijack audio from Cubase and can play at the same time, which WMP and Winamp both fail to do, so I don't think that's the cause.

[hitchcockgreen]

Odd then. I'd have first assumed that it was a mixer setting, then failing that, other software hijacking the audio.

I have never had an audio problem with Win 7/BZ in any carnation, including stock.

And Yeah, I just started using winamp again since....well let's say the late 90s. It wants to hijack everything. I'm not entirely pleased with it but I'm using it over iTunes because it will work with my ipod.