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burn disc as data and audio

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First post, by emosun

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So back when I was a kid I noticed my "Age of Empires 2" cd rom contained the games music tracks. When the game would start , the cd would spin up and music would start playing. this disc was also the game/installation disc.

At first I assumed it was reading some sort of audio file on the disc but no , this is actually a regular music cd that works in any regular cd player.

So question is , how do you burn a cd that is both a data disc and an audio disc like this age of empires cd?

Reply 1 of 1, by Rawrl

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The term you're looking for is Mixed Mode Cd.

I'm not sure how much of this translates to PC games, but games for older consoles (Sega CD, Sega Saturn, PSX) are often distributed in BIN/CUE format. They have one or more .BIN files, containing a sector-by-sector copy of the data on the disc, and a .CUE file, which contains information on how that data is laid out. For example, here's the cuesheet for the first disc of Panzer Dragoon Saga:

FILE "PANZER DRAGOON SAGA DISC 1 OF 4 (U).BIN" BINARY
  TRACK 01 MODE1/2352
    INDEX 01 00:00:00
  TRACK 02 AUDIO
    PREGAP 00:02:00
    INDEX 01 60:59:23
  TRACK 03 AUDIO
    INDEX 00 61:07:60
    INDEX 01 61:09:60

Occasionally the .BINs are accompanied by .WAV files containing the raw PCM data from the CD. These are handled the same way by the cuesheets, just with separate "FILE" entries. If you're really unlucky, you get a game as ISO/MP3 and need to convert the .MP3 files to .WAV before your chosen burning program will accept them.

It's basically a question of what format you have the game in. The GoG version of Quake, for example, includes full disc images along with the proper cuesheets for CD audio.

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