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Colonization for Windows - the sound problem

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First post, by hwh

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Colonization was one of those programs which used the cd audio cable during the game and chose various tracks based on what was happening in the game.

The audio data on the colonization cd is located on tracks after track 1, the data. As you probably guessed, I can't get the thing to play.

However, a game which uses a similar technique, Age of Empires 2, will in fact play its music.

I am quite frustrated and bewildered. I can't even get a cd player to play it. I went to the lengths of installing Win 3.1 on Dosbox and installing Colonization there (the point was to slow the animations down), and then mounting the CD-ROM in there. The drive does work in Win 3.1 - I can even get the game to play the data track as music (it's not very easy listening) but the other tracks just don't play.

Now as for the drive itself, it's SATA and has no audio cable, which it supposedly does not need. It's just supposed to work the way it is. Ideas?

Reply 1 of 4, by DonutKing

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I had a similar problem with various games using redbook CD audio under XP.

In device manager, under properties for the oiptical drive, there is an option to enable digital CD audio (rather than analog over the cable between the sound card and the drive).

Also, I found that the optical drive HAD to be the first drive in alphabetical order after all hard drives. So if you use daemon tools or similar and/or have more than one optical drive, make sure the drive you are using for Colonization is the first after all hard drives.

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Reply 2 of 4, by Jorpho

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There is a utility called _inmm.dll that can address this problem.
_inmm.dll : another solution for problematic CD audio?
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Then again, that's a win32 DLL, and if the game runs in Windows 3.1, that might be entirely unrelated.

hwh wrote:

I am quite frustrated and bewildered. I can't even get a cd player to play it.

Do you mean you haven't been able to get the music to play anywhere? What about ISO Buster?

Reply 3 of 4, by DosFreak

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If trying to use CD audio in 3.1 you need to install the CD Audio driver for Windows 3.1

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Reply 4 of 4, by hwh

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Gentlemen, I think I have found my problem. There is no music. On a different Win98 computer with the old audio cable setup, I can cue the AOEII music, and the Colonization music ought to work without attention. But...there only seems to be one track.

I have been told that an .ISO doesn't keep other tracks like music, unlike for instance an .NRG or .CUE/.BIN. Bizarrely, there are a hundred people offering a 34MB .ISO of Colonization (16MB of which is adobe acrobat - 🤣?) and no one has a .CUE/.BIN or .NRG.

Unfortunately it would seem I have to buy an extra copy of Colonization somewhere. Thanks for the ideas.

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