Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-06-05, 04:04:

I think it would be beneficial to list the number of CD audio tracks that have been found on a particular disc during your grep search.

I didn't include it and don't plan to make this change, but agree it would be interesting.
The challenge is re-integrating the results with the groups' additions, removals, and improvements - all of which is a lot of manual work.

Would you be interested in making that adaptation to the grep statement and then manually re-layer the groups' modifications? (we could then drop my prior list and yours carry on as a rev2 improvement 👍)

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-06-05, 04:04:

That way, it would be easier to identify games which simply have 1-2 bonus tracks from the ones that actually use CD audio for in-game music playback. The latter usually have 5 or more CD audio tracks on the disc.

Games that use CDDA for spoken dialog often combine many sequences into a handful of tracks and simply seek within the track to play a particular sequence (as opposed to storing them as separate tracks). This is partly because tracks themselves waste some space, but more importantly because the redbook specification is limited to 99 audio tracks.

A couple examples:
- Jones in the Fast Lane (one CDDA track holds all spoken dialog)
- Stellar 7 (one CDDA track holds in-game music plus all spoken cut-scene dialog)
- Inca 1 CD edition (one CDDA track holds all spoken dialog and music)
- Inca 2 (One CDDA track holds all music. Note: some releases have different quality audio or might be improperly ripped) -- thanks Spikey

krcroft wrote on 2023-06-05, 13:50:

I didn't include it and don't plan to make this change, but agree it would be interesting.
The challenge is re-integrating the results with the groups' additions, removals, and improvements - all of which is a lot of manual work.

Yup, that does seem to be the case. I'm not that good with Linux scripting, so this is all I could do about counting the number of audio tracks:

1grep "AUDIO" *.cue -o | cut -d ':' -f 1 | uniq -c

When applied to Tomb Raider Gold, this results in the following output:

19 Tomb Raider Gold CD1.cue
23 Tomb Raider Gold CD2.cue

So the first disc contains 9 audio tracks while the second one has 3. Not ideal, but it gets the point across. Feel free to modify as you like.

Games that use CDDA for spoken dialog often combine many sequences into a handful of tracks and simply seek within the track to play a particular sequence (as opposed to storing them as separate tracks). This is partly because tracks themselves waste some space, but more importantly because the redbook specification is limited to 99 audio tracks.

Interesting. I imagine some "talkie" adventure games from that time may have used a similar approach.

Inca 2 definitely has all music in one large Redbook file too. Although some releases have different quality audio (or are improperly ripped), it seems.

The Incredible Machine 2

This is the only DOS game that I can think of off the top of my head.

Moon Buggy (Rondomedia or Sprint Software releases)