Tomb Raider Unofficial Audio Patch

by Kevin Bracey (KMO)

Version 1.10 (30 Oct 2007)

Contents

Disclaimer
Introduction
CD Tracks
Installation
Original PC, PlayStation-style or Tomb Raider II-style experience?
Performance
Tomb Raider: Unfinished Business
Identification
Known bugs and problems
Feedback
Acknowledgements

Disclaimer

Tomb Raider is copyright Core Design and Eidos Interactive. This program is a modification of their original code, and remains their copyright. However this modification is unsupported by them. Use is at your own risk, and you must own a legal copy of Tomb Raider for PC.

Introduction

This archive contains a patched DOS executable for the original Tomb Raider.

The patch reactivates the in-game music cues that have always been present in the level files and were heard in the PlayStation version, but have so far been ignored by the PC version. It can also replace some of the low-quality internal audio with CD-based audio, as on the PlayStation.

This is a different solution from that of the original partially-completed Audio Pack for Glidos, which used artificial scripted triggers based on 3D texture capture to deduce player positioning, and simulate the original triggers. By contrast, this patch reactivates the genuine triggers from the original game, and provides all the music for the complete game in all the right places.

To make use of the patched binary you will need:

This patch does not itself provide any hooks for hard disc-based audio. It remains totally DOS and CD-based just like the original version. But Glidos 1.39 or later can intercept the CD calls from this patched executable and play from MP3 files, and is available pre-configured with this patch — consult the Glidos website for details. The rest of this guide is written as if you were playing from CD.

If running from an unmodified Tomb Raider CD and without Glidos, the patched game should function as before with no ill effects. The patch should be compatible with all systems that supported the original Tomb Raider.

CD Tracks

A full set of audio files in the correct order is currently available from Tomb Raider Hub. A set of MP3s can also be taken from the Tomb Raider Audio Pack for Glidos. Older versions of the Glidos Audio Pack did not have all the required files, so download version 1.6 or later. Alternatively, all the audio can be copied from a PlayStation Tomb Raider CD.

Tomb Raider Chronicles has instructions on how to burn a new Tomb Raider CD.

The track structure of the CD required by this patch is as follows:

Track 1:Data
Tracks 2–10:Title, ambience and cut-scene audio as on original PC CD
Tracks 11–27:Extra music tracks 3–21 from the PlayStation CD, with some gaps
Track 28:Silence (such as track 57 from the PlayStation CD)
Tracks 29–59:Dialogue tracks 26–56 from the PlayStation CD
Track 60:Secret chimes (track 13 from the PlayStation CD)

The extra tracks must be placed in the correct order. This is an extended version of the order used for the MP3s in the original Glidos Audio Pack, but note that the Glidos Audio Packs start their numbering at 1 instead of 2. In detail the the tracks for the PC CD correspond to:

PC CDPS CDAudio Pack
2 2 01maintitle.mp3
3 5 02ambient.mp3
4 03rain.mp3
5 04wind.mp3
6 05heartbeat.mp3
7 22 06natla.mp3
8 23 07larson.mp3
9 24 08scion.mp3
10 25 09hieroglyph.mp3
11 3 10revelationchorus1.mp3
12 4 11maintitle2.mp3
13 6 12chase1.mp3
14 7 13revelation1.mp3
15 8 14tension1.mp3
16 9 15atmospheric.mp3
17 10 16revelation2.mp3
18 11 17incidental1.mp3
19 12 18incidental2.mp3
20 14 19shortsound.mp3
21 15 20shortchorus1.mp3
22 16 21tension2.mp3
23 17 22shortchorus2.mp3
24 18 23ominouschorus.mp3
25 19 24revelationchorus2.mp3
26 20 25chase2.mp3
27 21 26revelation3.mp3
28 57 27.mp3
29–59 26–56 28.mp3 – 58.mp3
60 13 59.mp3

The ordering is designed to be compatible with the original CD and the old Audio Pack, and to permit different levels of functionality. Every time the patch goes to play audio, it will check whether the track it needs is available. If the needed track is not available, the game will fall back to internal 8-bit audio where possible, otherwise it will not play the track.

Thus, you do not have to burn all the tracks, but you can't leave any gaps. If you only have the old Audio Pack tracks, or are using the original CD in with tracks 2–10, the patch will work fine.

If you don't have a silence track and only burn up to track 27, the patch will still work, but performance may be reduced when there's no ambience. The system works better if it can play silence rather than stop the drive, as this leaves the drive spinning and ready to seek to a track. The PlayStation CD has 3 minutes of silence as track 57 for this purpose.

If you're concerned about getting the maximum possible audio quality, you may want to make the effort to source tracks from an existing CD rather than an MP3 file where possible, to avoid any compression loss. You could take tracks 2 to 9 from your existing CD, and the rest from an MP3 pack.

Installation

This patch is based on the Voodoo Rush patch for Tomb Raider, which is designed to interface to a Glide API. Glide might be provided by real 3Dfx Voodoo card, Glidos or dgVoodoo. You must have have a working installation with the original Eidos Glide-based TOMB.EXE before attempting to install this patch.

Once you have a reburnt CD, and a working Tomb Raider installation, take a backup of your exiting TOMB.EXE, then copy the patched TOMB.EXE file into your Tomb Raider hard disc directory (C:\TOMBRAID by default).

One thing to be aware of is that the CD is likely to play much louder than the internal game sounds. This wasn't so much of a problem when just playing the ambient noise, but once the music and dialogue come from the CD, the disparity becomes a problem. The music volume control built into the game does not work, but if running from Windows you can use the Windows Volume Control to lower the CD Player volume — I've lowered mine to the half-way mark.

If running on a modern version of Windows, you may also want to experiment with turning on and off the Digital CD Playback option for your drive. See the bugs section below.

Original PC, PlayStation-style or Tomb Raider II-style experience?

The patch offers a number of different audio possibilities, each subject to the limits of how many tracks are available on the CD. You can play with sound in the original PC style, original PlayStation style, or in a combined PC/PlayStation style similar to Tomb Raider II, with a couple of variants. It's surprising how much the feel of the game can be changed purely by this choice.

The choice is made by an option passed to the executable. You can add the option "-audio n" to its command line to select style n. This must be passed as the first parameter, and it must be lower-case — it's pretty tricky patching command-line parsing into a program that didn't originally have any. If the parameter is not found, the game defaults to style 2 (TR2-style).

The available choices are:

Original PC style (-audio 0)

The minimalist's choice, and how PC players have always experienced the game. Tomb Raider is a much bleaker experience without the music. Yet somehow the increased sense of isolation can actually lead to a more engrossing experience. With this option, the patched version operates basically the same as the unpatched version, except for a couple of bug fixes (such as restarting ambience after baddie dialogue).

PlayStation style (-audio 1)

What the designers originally intended, and how PlayStation owners experienced it. The game opens with the ambience, but it soon dies away, leaving you alone in silence. Dramatic or mysterious music plays in at various points, and occasionally the ambience comes back for a while to stimulate the mood.

Tomb Raider II style (default, -audio 2)

This is the style that was adopted for Tomb Raider II and further sequels. It retains the continuous ambience of the PC version, but restores the use of dramatic music at key points. However, because there is continuous ambience, the occasional ambience cues which broke the silence are redundant and no longer used. This is the default mode as it's the most elegant way to get add the missing PlayStation music without disturbing the normal ambience that PC players are accustomed to.

Tomb Raider II style with internal chimes (-audio 3)

On the PlayStation the secret chimes are played from CD, and thus interrupt any music; this can occasionally be irritating. This is one area the PC version came out ahead through its use of internal audio — the secret chimes were specially coded not to interrupt other audio (unlike internal dialogue, which does). If you want chimes to not interrupt anything else, and don't mind them being lower quality, try this option. It also has the advantage of avoiding any slight CD access delay.

Tomb Raider II style with internal audio (-audio 4)

Getting all the dialogue from CD leads to better quality, but there's always a slight delay accessing the track. In practice, this is only really a big deal for Lara's Home, but if it's bothering you, you can go back to using internal tracks whereever possible, albeit with a resulting loss in quality.

Tomb Raider: The Golden Mask style (-audio 5)

I was inspired to add this option by playing The Golden Mask, which uses ambience cues at a couple of points to change the mood. It's likely to be somewhat less effective for Tomb Raider, where the ambience cues were placed with the belief that they would be replacing silence, rather than another ambient track. The cues will be particularly pointless in the Peru levels, where they will be interrupting a loop of themselves. Nevertheless, it may be interesting in the later levels.

Performance

Performance should be good, as long as a silence track is available on the CD. On my system the game pauses a quarter of a second or less on a track change, which is much the same as Tomb Raider II.

It's possible some drives and PCs may still have problems. I know that Core were apparently unable to get it to work reliably; so there may be issues on some drives I'm unaware of. However, I have refined their implementation somewhat.

The key to performance appears to be keeping the drive continually playing audio, so as to eliminate spin-up and spin-down delays. It's possible that Core didn't refine this technique in time for Tomb Raider, but it's how Tomb Raider II works well; it relies on the continuous ambience to keep the drive busy.

I would nevertheless advise using a third-party utility such as Nero DriveSpeed or Naiobrin CD-ROM Tool to bring a high-speed CD drive down to 4× or 8× speed. The drive will then spend less time unnecessarily spinning up and down. This will also improve the performance of the full-motion video clips.

An external helper program such as Glidos, or some sort of general hard-disc based virtual CD-ROM system that supports audio would be another way to improve performance.

Tomb Raider: Unfinished Business

No patch is provided for Unfinished Business, as the level files for this game do not contain any soundtrack triggers. This is presumably because the levels were designed for the PC, and the level designer was aware that the PC would ignore any triggers.

Identification

The patched executable and the patch version can be identified by the announcement under the normal copyright message on exit. (This may not be visible if your game is configured to close the DOS window on exit).

Known bugs and problems

Feedback

If you have any comments on the patch, come and discuss it at Tomb Raider Forums or VOGONS, where I go by the user name of KMO.

Acknowledgements

I'd like to thank:

And the tools and resources which made it possible: