Using a CD audio track emulator for CivNET's CD audio music tracks

[Blake00]

As we all know these days people can play both CivWIN and CivNET on modern 64bit operating systems using either a virtual XP machine or more recently WineVDM. However as discussed over in @Lord_Hill 's excellent ports comparison thread while CivWIN uses a wav file soundtrack CivNET uses the Civ2 like system of playing music tracks off the CD forcing you to have the game CD in the drive if you want the music, and for whatever reason the tracks don't play off a CD or CD image (even if its a BIN made correct with music tacks) when used through a virtual machine. However I might have an interesting alternative...

A helpful fellow over on the Civ2 Discord has informed me of a opensource github hosted program called ogg-winmm CD Audio Emulator that allows people to play ogg files instead of cd tracks with old games without having to hack the games themselves (unless there's DRM) and apparently even GoG have been using it!
https://github.com/bangstk/ogg-winmm

As soon as I realised it could help with the Civ2 situation I also thought of CivNET. Also in theory it could be used for modding purposes since once you have the game's soundtrack all in ogg files you can swap out the tracks for other music songs.

I'm a bit busy atm but I'll try to run some tests on this soon.
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[Lord_Hill]

Civnet in fact allows any cd in the drive after the initial install. I burnt an audio cd of roland tracks and they played just fine. I'm familiar with winmm, though it never occured to me to try it with civnet, it might not play nice with winevdm. I'll give it a try tomorrow morning and see.

EDIT - just to note I test with WineVDM and PCEm emulator running Windows 95, not a VM

 

[Blake00]

Yeah I remember you used to be able to put music CDs in when playing Civ2 as well.. but I think it got harder after they added a game CD check to the final MGE release and then ToT (although I think you could still switch them after the check). So yeah I figured if early versions of Civ2 didn't have DRM then it's 'younger brother' CivNET would hopefully be all good too.

By modding soundtracks I was more thinking for scenarios.. as people could do some pretty cool stuff!

Yeah how it interacts with WineVDM is another very good question mate. You may get to testing it all before me as I've got some busy work days ahead!
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[livinginaz]

Was it confirmed that this worked for Civ2? I am having no luck at all. I am using Win2k but I assume XP and 7 will do the same. You will have to open the images to read, my screen is 1440p.


By simply dragging the files as they are, the game will not work anymore. It throws this error, and no matter how many times you click OK it still fails.


I renamed the winmm.dll file to win32.dll as mentioned in the readme. Now I can play the game. Interestingly it didn't tell me that it couldn't find the CD when I first opened the game, it went straight to the menu. But to no avail.


I also noticed that there is no winmm.dll or win32.dll file in the game folder (or any subfolder) to begin with. Perhaps this is why it is not working... I tried it with some other programs that aren't games and it simply did nothing. Any tips as to what to do to rectify this, or whether it is in fact even possible?

 

[livinginaz]

Tried with CivNet and same deal. I am using VLC to rip the .ogg files straight from the game disc with the correct file names (track02.ogg ands so on). I can hear the sound effects from the game, but silent music. Again it does not complain about lack of CD anymore.

 

[Blake00]

Was it confirmed that this worked for Civ2? I am having no luck at all. I am using Win2k but I assume XP and 7 will do the same. You will have to open the images to read, my screen is 1440p.

View attachment 663327
By simply dragging the files as they are, the game will not work anymore. It throws this error, and no matter how many times you click OK it still fails.

View attachment 663328
I renamed the winmm.dll file to win32.dll as mentioned in the readme. Now I can play the game. Interestingly it didn't tell me that it couldn't find the CD when I first opened the game, it went straight to the menu. But to no avail.

View attachment 663330
I also noticed that there is no winmm.dll or win32.dll file in the game folder (or any subfolder) to begin with. Perhaps this is why it is not working... I tried it with some other programs that aren't games and it simply did nothing. Any tips as to what to do to rectify this, or whether it is in fact even possible?

Darn, nah I posted a similar thread in Civ2 but am yet to test myself.

Using a CD audio track emulator to remove final MGE CD reliance hurdle

As we all know @FoxAhead 's excellent Civ2UIA patch tool allows us to play Civ2 on modern 64bit operating systems and removes the CD check. Civ2's video folders on the CD (KINGS and VIDEO) can also be copied over to the Civ2 install folder almost totally removing the need for the CD. However as...

forums.civfanatics.com

Where you using it with Civ2UIA as that disables the security check? That should stop the you needing the civ2 cd stuff. However if it didn't work with any other game you tried then yeah there's presumably something more going on. I'll have to try and mess around with it myself later in the week.
EDIT: Oh wait.. I can see you're testing under very different circumstances.. as in an old version of Civ2 (as I can see it doesn't say Multiplayer Gold Edition at the top) on an old OS like Win2k lol. I was thinking more trying it with MGE with Civ2UIA on a modern OS. As this program may not even work on old 90s OSs, although I'm not sure how old it is! The readme says it was modifed to work with Windows 10 so who know if those changes broke compatibility with older OS's too.
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[livinginaz]

Darn, nah I posted a similar thread in Civ2 but am yet to test myself.

Using a CD audio track emulator to remove final MGE CD reliance hurdle

As we all know @FoxAhead 's excellent Civ2UIA patch tool allows us to play Civ2 on modern 64bit operating systems and removes the CD check. Civ2's video folders on the CD (KINGS and VIDEO) can also be copied over to the Civ2 install folder almost totally removing the need for the CD. However as...

forums.civfanatics.com

Where you using it with Civ2UIA as that disables the security check? That should stop the you needing the civ2 cd stuff. However if it didn't work with any other game you tried then yeah there's presumably something more going on. I'll have to try and mess around with it myself later in the week.
EDIT: Oh wait.. I can see you're testing under very different circumstances.. as in an old version of Civ2 (as I can see it doesn't say Multiplayer Gold Edition at the top) on an old OS like Win2k lol. I was thinking more trying it with MGE with Civ2UIA on a modern OS. As this program may not even work on old 90s OSs, although I'm not sure how old it is! The readme says it was modifed to work with Windows 10 so who know if those changes broke compatibility with older OS's too.
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Yeah, I only have the original disc that worked with Windows 3.1 and 95, I got it at a street market in Otay Tijuana some time ago. Does that mean that the MGE is a 32-bit application? If you'd like, I can get on a 32-bit install of Windows 7 and download an ISO copy of the MGE and try it out. That should be new enough, given that the winmm tool was last updated in 2015. I don't have access to Windows 10, unfortunately.

The only thing is that I will likely be unable to rip the soundtrack to .ogg from the ISO file, though I'm assuming it'll accept the tracks from my original version once I do the Civ2UIA.

 

[Blake00]

Yup MGE is 32bit so it will run on a modern 64bit OS however it crashes so fans made a special 64bit patches for both MGE and ToT. FoxAhead includes the 64bit patch in his Civ2UIA tool that enhances MGE, fixes a bunch of problems and most importantly also contains a CD check disable patch.

Yeah I'm still on Windows 7 too so that's what I was going to test it on later this week.

Yup MGE will start and play the music from older versions of Civ2 CD thankfully (as there are a number of Civ2 songs they couldn't fit on the MGE CD).. and yes an ISO won't have the music tracks. I can't help you locate one for obvious reasons but there are alternative CD images of MGE online. I've seen BIN and IMG images that contain the music tracks and usually a CUE or some sort of other control file list the tracks. So in theory if one of those was mounted then VLC would think its a CD and rip the tracks off it. I'm also curious about tracks names as I think data would be track zero so the first ogg file would need to start at 01 I guess.

 

[Lord_Hill]

This thread is going in lots of different directions, but to the original question - 'does CivNet work with ogg-winmm.dll?', no I doesn't. Only 32bit applications are supported. Nice idea though.

 

[livinginaz]

This thread is going in lots of different directions, but to the original question - 'does CivNet work with ogg-winmm.dll?', no I doesn't. Only 32bit applications are supported. Nice idea though.

Yeah sorry about that, I didn't realize there was a CIv2 version of the thread or it wouldn't have been derailed like this. Probably need an application that's isolated to ntvdm for it work with 16-bit apps.

 

[Lord_Hill]

No problem, given that I know CivNet works using a physical cd via winevdm on Windows 10 and with a bin/cue rip of an audio cd via the PCEm emulator (also running on Windows 10), there are enough options out there for people who want to give it a go.

 

[Blake00]

Yes I was going to say perhaps it's best if we move the Civ2 talk over to the Civ2 version now which I can see you've done and had some success so I'll go reply there!

Shame about it not working with 16bit apps, I wonder if the GoG variant does. However yeah as Lord Hill says it's not a huge issue for Civ1 fans and is a bigger one for Civ2 fans but I figured hey it was worth a shot!
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[Lord_Hill]

If anyone else was planning to create a replacement audio cd, here's the order the tracks need to be in

track 01 - leave blank (this is the data track on a mixed mode cd like CivNet)
track 02 - title screen/intro (once again like CivWin, title screen and intro use the same track)
track 03 - Frederick/German
track 04 - Genghis Khan/Mongol
track 05 - Gandhi/India
track 06 - Lincoln/America
track 07 - Mao/China
track 08 - Shaka/Zulu
track 09 - Stalin/Russia
track 10 - Montezuma/Aztec
track 11 - Ramesses/Egypt
track 12 - Alexander/Greek
track 13 - Ceaser/Roman
track 14 - Elizabeth/England
track 15 - Hammurabi/Babylonian
track 16 - Napoleon/France
track 17 - lose the game
track 18 - win the game

The little tunes that play when you win/lose combat are wav files, as are all other in game sound effects.