Does anyone have Civ 2 MGE? Can you do me a favor?

[The_cranky_herm]

Thanks to Schloss Ritter for letting me know about Civ 2 MGE. But now I'd like to know about Fantastic Worlds too.

I want to know which Redbook tracks are on the disc. Can you tell me which ones? Here's how you can find out, if you have WinXP (or Vista) and WMP11.

First, insert the Civ 2 MGE disc. Wait a few seconds, and make sure the disc is recognized by My Computer before going on to the next step.

Next, go to start, click "run," type "wmplayer."

While wmplayer is active, press Alt to bring down the menu, select "play->", select "DVD, VCD, or CD Audio->", and choose the drive that has your Civ 2 MGE disc.

Make sure the "Now Playing" tab is selected. Your player should look something like this (I have Civ 2 ToT inserted):

On the right of the player, you should see a list of track names, like I do here. If they just say "Track #", wait a little bit for WMP to connect to CDDB, and the names should change to the correct names.

Can you list the tracks that are on the Civ 2 FW disc? Thanks.

 

[Schloss Ritter]

I'm still using WMP 9 (on Win98), so I loaded it up in Winamp instead. There's no artist names, but here you go:

 

[Godwynn]

A lot of those sound like the names of scenarios. I haven't played CivII since... the late 1990's. My memory may be failing me.

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

It's not. They should. They are intentionally named after some of the scenarios. I think they're meant to play whenever their respective scenario is loaded, but I never pay attention to that sort of thing.

 

[Sub]

MGE is missing a few of the songs from the original. I don't know the name of the song, but they left out my favorite song from the original version.

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

Actually, MGE misses everything but Funeral March and Ode to Joy. Looking through the .txt files, it seems as though the programmers thought about enabling the old and new tracks together, but I haven't found a way to make this work. Oh well.

 

[The_cranky_herm]

Thanks. From the looks of things, it's exactly the same as Test of Time, minus "They're Here" and "The Dome," and some tracks renamed.

Now I have another request. Can anyone do the same thing for "Fantastic Worlds?"

 

[Mercator]

If you have ToT, you can actually see the track listings for the classic Civ2 CD, the Scenarios add-on CD and the Fantastic Worlds CD in the Game.txt file in the main ToT folder under @PICKMUSIC, @PICKMUSICSCENARIO and @PICKMUSICFANWORLDS, respectively.

For good measure, here's the FW track listing... The tracks in bold are the ones left over on the MGE and ToT CD's. The last track, X-Com, is the same as "They're Here" on the ToT CD but is apparently not on the MGE CD...

Funeral March
Ode to Joy
Tenochtitlan Revealed
Harvest of the Nile
Aristotle's Pupil
Augustus Rises
Gautama Ponders
Hammurabi's Code
The Shining Path
The Civil War
The Crusades
The Great War
American Revolution
Jihad
Alien Invasion
Mongol Horde
Apocolypse
Primeval World
New World
Fantasy
Mars
World of Jules Verne
X-Com

 

[The_cranky_herm]

Interesting. It looks like Fantastic Worlds has every single Civ II music track except for one: The Dome. That one appears to be unique to Test of Time. Anyone know if this is just a renamed version of something else? If it helps, it is 3:50.

I've compiled everything I know about the Civ II music tracks, and it took me some work to compile it all, so I might as well share it. Just for the hell of it, I've arranged them into groups and given names. You may skip reading this post if you aren't as obsessed with data collection as I am.

Common group: Used in Civ II, Conflicts, Fantastic Worlds, MGE, ToT
Funeral March
Ode To Joy

Classic group: Used in Civ II, Conflicts, Fantastic Worlds
Tenochtitlan Revealed
Harvest of the Nile
Aristotle's Pupil
Augustus Rises
Gautama Ponders
Hammurabi's Code
The Shining Path

Expansion group: Used in Conflicts, Fantastic Worlds, MGE, ToT
The Crusades (called Crusade in ToT)
Alien Invasion (called Alien in ToT)
Mongol Horde
Apocolypse (called The Apocolypse in ToT)

Conflicts group: Used in Conflicts, Fantastic Worlds
The Civil War
The Great War
American Revolution
Jihad

Fantastic group: Used in Fantastic Worlds, ToT, MGE
Primeval World (Called Jurasic Jungle in ToT)
New World
Fantasy (Called Tolkien in ToT)
Mars (Called Mars Expedition in ToT)
World of Jules Verne (Called Jules Verne in ToT)

This leaves X-Com (They're Here in ToT) which is in Fantastic Worlds and ToT but not MGE, and The Dome which is only in ToT.

Now a summary of the history of Civ II music:

Civ II had two groups, the Common group and the Classic group.

Then Conflicts came out, which had everything on the Civ II disc plus the Conflicts group and the Expansion group.

Then Fantastic Worlds came out, which had everything on the Conflicts disc plus the Fantastic group, plus "X-Com."

Then MGE came out, which cut out the Classic group, the Conflicts group, and "They're Here," leaving only the Expansion group and the Fantastic group (minus "X-Com.")

Then Test of Time came out, which brought back "X-Com" renaming it "They're Here," and adding one brand new track called "The Dome."

 

[Mercator]

Hmmm, interesting... They misspelled Apocalypse.

One correction: MGE came out before ToT.
And "The Dome" is definitely not a renamed track.

 

[The_cranky_herm]

Hmmm, interesting... They misspelled Apocalypse.

Jurassic too.

One correction: MGE came out before ToT.

Right. I knew that. Not sure how I screwed that one up when describing the history. I just fixed that section.

And "The Dome" is definitely not a renamed track.

Thanks.

Now for my next project: Find copies of both MGE and Fantastic Worlds, and try hack together my own "Civ II Ultimate OCD Edition" which has all the features of MGE and all the music of Fantastic Worlds plus "The Dome." If I'm successful, I'll be sure to let you all know how it's done.

 

[Mercator]

You might have trouble fitting all that on one CD. That was probably the reason they cut the tracks in the first place. Well, it shouldn't be a problem if you can put it on a DVD.

Which versions of Civ2 do you already have?

Hmmm, does the MGE CD contain the wonder movies and animated heralds?

 

[The_cranky_herm]

You might have trouble fitting all that on one CD. That was probably the reason they cut the tracks in the first place. Well, it shouldn't be a problem if you can put it on a DVD.

You can't put music tracks on a DVD. My plan is to have two CDs. One will be an "install" disc that contains all the files MGE uses plus any modifications that I make, with a custom installer. The second will be a "music" CD with all of the Fantastic Worlds music tracks, plus "The Dome," and whatever files are needed for the executable to recognize it as a Civ II expansion disc with music tracks on it.

Which versions of Civ2 do you already have?

At the moment, none of them, though I did own Civ II many years ago (and I have no idea what happened to it), and I remember it having lots of fun stuff that ToT lacks in the main game. I do own ToT, but I'm not going to incorporate anything but "The Dome" into this project, because I consider ToT to be an alternate version of CivII, as opposed to an extension like Fantastic Worlds and MGE.

Hmmm, does the MGE CD contain the wonder movies and animated heralds?

If I'm successful in getting a copy, I'll let you know. I *hope* that MGE has absolutely everything that was included in CivII, Conflicts, and Fantastic Worlds (aside from some music).

 

[Mercator]

Fantastic Worlds is an add-on, though, and requires classic Civ2, so you wouldn't be able to do anything with that CD except use it for the soundtrack. If you're only after the soundtrack anyway, the CiC add-on will suffice in combination with ToT as well (as your nice breakdown of the tracks shows).

MGE should have everything in Civ2+CiC+FW (though I'm not sure about the videos), but there are some notable differences. The biggest difference is that the AI in MGE is much more aggressive than in FW. So if you truly want everything you'll have to get them all. But then that depends on the severity and/or focus of your OCD.

 

[The_cranky_herm]

If the soundtrack is the only thing that FW has that MGE does not, then its soundtrack is all I'm after.

As for the OCD's severity, it's off the ****ing charts. I own Civ III and haven't even played a full game of it yet because I want to play the games in order, and I haven't yet played the "complete" version of Civ II. The scope's a bit more lenient, though. I may decide that the aggressive AI is an improvement, in which case I won't need the original. But I could just as likely decide that both AI's are necessary for a "complete" Civ II and then have to track down another copy of the original. In any case, I'm going to try to get MGE and FW first, and figure out what to do after/if I get them.

 

[The_cranky_herm]

Ok, I've got MGE and FW in the mail, and I've done some experimenting. MGE has the animated heralds and wonders. FW does not.

The bad news is that my plan of including "The Dome" isn't going to work exactly as I had in mind. It expects a certain number of CD tracks to be on the disc, and the music will not play if the number of tracks is different than what it expects. I have created a custom version of the FW CD, with one extra track, and all of the data files removed except the civ2.exe file (that's the file that MGE uses to determine which Civ2 disc is in the drive). So I've settled on removing the final track number from the cue file, which makes X-Com an extra long track.

 

[Mercator]

Hmmm, interesting... That's not the case with classic Civ2, is it?

I created a Civ2 CD myself in the past. Well, it wasn't specifically a CD I made for Civ2, just a bunch of files I burned on CD, but with a convenient Civ2 folder and some music tracks too. Civ2 (FW) recognized and played it just fine. I don't think pre-MGE Civ2 actually needs the Civ2.exe file, only the Civ2 folder, so that might be the difference. Then again, FW should be able to distinguish them too, if it wants to come up with the right track listing...

What happens if you replace the FW Civ2.exe on the CD with a zero-byte file with the same name?

 

[aberwak]

I'm just curious about the status of this project. It sounds really neat. I'd love to know if it works out or not so I can try it. I actually kind of liked the music to Civ II and would love to hear the stuff I'm missing by having MGE.

 

[Necrosis]

to hear the stuff I'm missing by having MGE

Or by having a European release of Civ Chronicles, haha.

I laugh because it's that or crying.




In all seriousness tho, I'd love to know if people got this working, at least then we could fix their broken game ourselves..