[SOLVED] CD Music for games in WINE

Hamish · 2016-10-29 00:00:17

I am trying to play some old CD-ROM games in WINE that need to read the disc in order to play music. No matter what Audio CD I insert in my drive I can not get any kind of playback to work, be it from the original game discs or from a separate music album. I have tried creating a separate drive letter in winecfg directed to the virtual mount point determined by gvfs (/run/user/1000/gvfs/cdda:host=sr0/) with the type set to CD-ROM, but to no avail.

Last edited by Hamish (2016-10-29 06:44:39)

Hamish · 2016-10-29 06:43:38

So I have found a solution, even if it is a little obtuse. To get the CD music to work I need to rip the game discs to a bin/cue pair and then mount them with CDemu. Then I need to go into winecfg and create a new CD-ROM type drive that points to the CDemu mount point (say /run/media/user/GAME). For whatever reason, that works. When I tried to do the same with the actual discs it would never work. I do not know what that says about how WINE is handling things in this case.

Last edited by Hamish (2016-10-30 16:57:21)

Wild Penguin · 2016-10-30 13:29:08

Hi Hamish,

It's been a while since I've used anything with CDDA in wine or in DOS. But I'm guessing your problem boils down into two things:

1) Windows (programs) expects drive letters which are mapped into devices (whereas in a modern Linux distro, a CD will be mounted somewhere, and usually in a different mount point for different CDs) and
2) At least older (not that old!) Windows versions (and programs) play CDDA in analog way - i.e. give orders to the CDrom device to play back the CDDA track (the OS does not decode it, and actually knows nothing about the playback).

For the first point, you need to have wine configured so that wine knows about the actual physical device (/dev/sr0) (see additional settings in winecfg -> drive settings). This can be a hassle, as there is no permanent mount point (usually) in a modern distro anymore, but I presume it is still achievable. The last time I did this, was many years ago - before udev etc - and the distro (whatever it was I was using at the time) had several ways of configuring the automount point for the CD drive. In any case, back then I had a permanent automount point. But perhaps more recent wines have some way to work around this (from the looks of it, a mount point is not mandatory anymore - perhaps if you map a drive without a mount point, but only the device, wine will notice where it is actually mounted?)

If wine can find the actual device, you either need to have the analog audio cable connected from (and IDE, as SATA drives don't have an analog audio connector) CD drive to CD audio input - or, wine needs to have a way to "emulate" CDDA playback by sending the audio data trough some audio system daemon, which does the actual decoding (similar to any modern OS would play back a CD).

You may also want to take a look at cdemu (cdemu-daemon and cdemu-client). That way you can create a virtual CD drive, along with a way how analog CD audio will be handled. This may be needed even if you have the original discs, exactly because older OSes handle CD drives differently.

Hamish · 2016-10-30 16:53:40

Wild Penguin wrote:

You may also want to take a look at cdemu (cdemu-daemon and cdemu-client). That way you can create a virtual CD drive, along with a way how analog CD audio will be handled. This may be needed even if you have the original discs, exactly because older OSes handle CD drives differently.

Which is what I ended up doing, but I appreciate you going into greater detail on the subject.

Going through the process of making separate disc images is probably for the best anyway as a lot of the CD-ROMs I am using are old second hand copies; the one that started this thread was a game jewel case I just picked up from a thrift store for ¢50 cents CND.

Last edited by Hamish (2017-11-15 03:17:15)

Arch Linux

#1 2016-10-29 00:00:17

[SOLVED] CD Music for games in WINE

#2 2016-10-29 06:43:38

Re: [SOLVED] CD Music for games in WINE

#3 2016-10-30 13:29:08

Re: [SOLVED] CD Music for games in WINE

#4 2016-10-30 16:53:40

Re: [SOLVED] CD Music for games in WINE

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