Sound help for a neat PC game no one here has probably played

[The 9th Sage]

Today I bought this neat little game called Astro Assembler (very japanese sounding title) that is basically an old school top-down vertical scrolling shooter. It has nice graphics with a lot of nice effects, and it's rather difficult for you who like challenges. But anyway, it says on the back of the package that it has something like '18 excellent CD Audio tracks' for the background music or something like that, but I don't see any on the disc, and can't get any music to come from it at all, however the sound effects work just fine. It should be compatible with XP, and it even runs using Direct X 7 (and has DX 8 on the CD) so it must be fairly recent.

I've searched for help on this but can't seem to find ANYTHING about all this. Does anyone know anything that could help out, BG music would really enhance this game I think.

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[SirDaShadow]

Ok, take your game cd and play it on a cd player. Can you hear music? If you do then the game uses cdda, which is good...but...

Take a Music CD to your computer. Don't load software and press the "Play" button on the cd/dvdrom (some don't have it tho). Can you hear it on the computer? No? Plug headphones on the front of the cdrom. Can you hear it now? Good. That means you are missing the analog cable from the cdrom to your sound card. At this point you have 2 choices...crack open the cpu case and find the cable and plug it into the sound card. Or run a cable from the front of the cd rom to the back of the computer where the "line in" is. Then open up the volume control and make sure Line In is selected.

Also while playing the game, before you do all this, plug headphones on the cdrom. If you hear the music, then it's definately playing it in "analog" mode....

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[The 9th Sage]

> Also while playing the game, before you do all this, plug
> headphones on the cdrom. If you hear the music, then it's
> definately playing it in "analog" mode....

I'm pretty sure it doesn't have CDDA audio on it. The proggie I use for ripping CDs doesn't see any tracks, and it has detected them flawlessly even when Winamp and other audio players won't.


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[JCE3000GT]

> > Also while playing the game, before you do all this, plug
> > headphones on the cdrom. If you hear the music, then it's
> > definately playing it in "analog" mode....

> I'm pretty sure it doesn't have CDDA audio on it. The
> proggie I use for ripping CDs doesn't see any tracks, and it
> has detected them flawlessly even when Winamp and other
> audio players won't.

I've seen some games use wav files and somehow the software reads it as a CD track...but some CD players can't read it correctly. Do you see any *.DA or *.DAT files on the CD?

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[The 9th Sage]

> I've seen some games use wav files and somehow the software
> reads it as a CD track...but some CD players can't read it
> correctly. Do you see any *.DA or *.DAT files on the CD?

No, just the setup files and extras folder, which contains DirectX etc, and I do have view hidden files on as well, so nothing in a hidden file. It's strange...apparently there's a demo floating around of this game, and it has music that works, so I know it SHOULD have music as advertised. :P

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[MegaManJuno]

Is it possibly a multisession disc? If so, maybe your drive is having some issues with reading one of the sessions...?

This is of course assuming that the stuff you are looking for actually physically IS on the disc in question...

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[The 9th Sage]

> Is it possibly a multisession disc? If so, maybe your drive
> is having some issues with reading one of the sessions...?

I don't think so, I made an ISO and opened it using this program that lets you look at ISOs and the files on them, and I didn't see anything there either.

> This is of course assuming that the stuff you are looking
> for actually physically IS on the disc in question...

I'm really wondering here. :P

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[Sliver X]

It's a long shot (if there isn't any actual music on the disc as you suspect, it's not going to do anything), but since most new PCs seem to lack analog cables for Redbook playback any more, you can try this:

Go to control panel, and open Multimedia.

Under "CD Music", there's a dropbox "Default CD-ROM drive for playing music". Pick the drive you're trying to play the game in, and click the box that says "Enable Digital CD Audio for this CD-ROM Device". Reboot if nessesary.

I had to do this to get music playback on burned Turbo CD games before I realized my old dead Celeron system had an analog cable in it. Why most manufacturers don't include these cables is beyond me, as they can't cost more than a nickel to make.

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