Is your drive hooked up correctly?
Try dumping it to bin/cue and see how many tracks you get.

feda wrote on 2025-01-22, 00:18:

Is your drive hooked up correctly?
Try dumping it to bin/cue and see how many tracks you get.

Drive is fine. I stuck in a regular Audio CD just to make sure and it fires right up. I use it for CDROM games and DVDs all the time with no issues.

I actually already tried to dump it as a bin/cue with ImgBurn and it spat out an empty bin and a cue file with a single track.

Use a program like IsoBuster to see how many tracks there are.

Older CDROM drives had a physical play sor skip button on the front that could play cd's without any software (like a normal cd player). If you have one of those you could see if it does anything. If not, I think there aren't any tracks on there. At least not in the CD format. Maybe the music is on the cd but only in a format that the game itself plays.

Doesn't answer your question of course, but on GOG.COM you can buy The Incredible Machine 3. The version of the game does work on Windows 98 (though you have to install it on XP or later first, and copy the files to your 98 machine). Strangely though, they have screwed with the soundtrack. It's like it's now playing the original music that's been converted to midi files. But, the GOG purchase does also include the full soundtrack as MP3 download (Which I think is the original CD release audio). So you could maybe burn that to a disk and play that music rather than the music the GOG version uses. The game wouldn't be controlling the playback though, so you'd need buttons on the drive, or software cd player to control it.

RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2025-01-22, 13:32:

Strangely though, they have screwed with the soundtrack. It's like it's now playing the original music that's been converted to midi files.

The CD image they included doesn't include any audio tracks so the game defaults to midi music. Which I assumed was GoG doing their usual trick of putting in the minimum effort (it's more difficult to make a game use a cd image if audio tracks are involved) but maybe they just used the same CD release as what OP has, that seems to be missing the CD audio completely.

(alternatively, maybe OP's CD isn't authentic and was created by burning GoG's butchered CD image to a disc...)

You can search for the numbers printed on the disc here and figure out which release you have:
http://redump.org/discs/quicksearch/incredible-machine/

jmarsh wrote on 2025-01-22, 20:39:

(alternatively, maybe OP's CD isn't authentic and was created by burning GoG's butchered CD image to a disc...)

OP said it's an original copy. So I would assume authentic. But it's certainly odd that it won't play.

It's 100% a real copy bought from a store back in the day. I guess maybe the disc could be faulty? I don't have ISOBuster, but I have IMGBurn and Winimage. I tried to make a Bin/Cue copy with IMGBurn, but it didn't contain any audio.

I don't see the copy I have on the redump website. My copy says Nimbus on center ring, not Sierra or KAO. It's also got a red CD case and not a black one like I am seeing in searches. The front of the disc also is slightly different. Maybe my release didn't have the CD audio?

There's a patch someone made for the GOG version to add the CD audio as flac. I just used that patch and it worked fine. So now I have CD Audio. But it's still a mystery. Maybe The Collector knows what the deal is? He seems to be the Sierra expert.