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Did it work as an audio CD, the way PS1 games do?
by andai 2mo ago
Did it work as an audio CD, the way PS1 games do?
- fullstop 2mo agoYes, the game just played it as a regular CD. In fact, if you put a different disc in the drive it would play the tracks from there instead. There were also console commands to change the track, stop the music, loop, or even reload the disc information if you needed to refresh it after swapping CDs.
- olyjohn 2mo agoYeah, and I remember if you didn't have the audio cable that went from the CDROM into your sound card, you would never hear the tracks. It wasn't your computer decoding the music, the CDROM drive was simply doing the decoding, and passing the audio out into a CDROM input (just a line-level audio signal) on your sound card.
- jaredhallen 2mo agoI'd forgotten about those little cables. If I recall correctly, they were small round cables, with maybe four conductors and a little flat connector with a clip?
- indrora 2mo ago4-conductor audio, generally. Later on there was a generation of two-conductor cables that used SPDIF/PCM Audio instead of analog audio for better fidelity.
- notpushkin 2mo agoI vaguely remember CD drives with a headphone jack output! (E.g. this one: https://pavel.network/using-cd-drive-as-poor-man-audio-player/ https://pavel.network/using-cd-drive-as-poor-man-audio-playe...)
- anthk 2mo agoAudio tracks and WAV/AU files weren't actually decoded, but straightly send to the sound card as bits. That's it, a command like cat file.wav > /dev/dsp Would just work under Unix (/dev/audio under plan9/9front) Thus, making a function for Quake to read the CD bits to the sound card would create almost no CPU usage, even less with DMA.
- fullstop 2mo agoMy cdrom drive also had an audio jack on it, so you could plug headphones directly into that if you wanted to have just CD audio and not the sounds coming from the PC.