Old skool Windows games + CD Audio - How? (Sega Rally especially)

EdButler

EdButler

EdButler

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157
Hi All,

Sega Rally Championship. Omg i love that game - as kids, my friends and i played those same 4 tracks (well actually 3, because 1 was crap) for hours and hours on end. Learning each corner like the back of our hand seeing who eek off a single millisecond from our times... We played on the Saturn which was a fantastic 'port' if you can call it that from the Model2 arcade.

One of the key memories for me however is how the music works with the tracks - its bloody fantastic. So every few years i pick up my Sega Rally iso backup from days past, mount it and give it a try and be inevitably disappointed. It either:
  1. Ran too quick
  2. Ran too slow?
  3. Ran too quick followed by too slow in a weird rubber-banding way
  4. CD-Audio doesn't work.
I tried so many things, god knows i tried. VM's, Compatibility Mode, Speed limiters etc etc. to no avail. I marveled the release of the Model2 MAME emulator, only to realise the music was pap midi style rubbish :(

I remember the planets magically aligned one year, or at least so i thought at the time. Microsoft had made this magical new OS which fixed all the issues! It was called Vista. Yeah i know what you're thinking; that didn't last long. Sega Rally couldn't even bring myself to keep that pile of turd, not even on a dual boot.

So moving on to today and Windows 10, we're nearly there. The game runs beautifully smoothly, but there's no CD Audio. Does anyone have any idea why it might not work? It this a common modern predicament?

I always remember building old PC's that the CD drives came with a 4-pin CD-Audio cable that went straight into the sound card. Surely they arent required? And before anyone chimes in about playing the audio as an MP3 along side the game - its not the same!!!!! :)

Thanks for listening, im praying. :D
 
I can't help with your problem sadly, but wanted to say how I loved and still love Sega Rally. I spent a small fortune back in 1995-6(?) on a Saturn just for Sega Rally after being blown away by it in the arcades. The Saturn version was nothing like the sit-down motion arcade experience but I still played it to death- I watched pretty much every replay of a Championship run in full too, loved the tunes.

I'd love to get the original pc version but I've retired my optical drive and I imagined it would be a pita to get running, as you found. I do still play the *cough* arcade version, it look and sounds great but I do miss the full replays and option to play Lakeside and Stratos :(

Last year I bought Revo, which wasn't a patch on the original but it was fun to play a more updated game. It has horrible frametiming/stuttering on recent OS though which put me off playing after a while.
 
https://www.play-old-pc-games.com/2014/11/13/daytona-usa-deluxe/

While this isn't sega rally, they list a known issue which doesn't sound a million miles away from your problem with the audio.

"There are multiple problems and unresolved issues with this game.

CD audio / no music problems – The Daytona USA Deluxe CD must be placed in the CD/DVD drive on your machine that has the first drive letter. If you have more than one (this includes any virtual CD/DVD drives you might have as part of a CD/DVD recording suite), make sure to use the drive that comes first alphabetically. If you need to change the drive letters of your optical drives, see this tutorial.

If you still get no CD audio even after following these pointers, you may need to create an image file of your game CD and use a CD/DVD emulator such as Daemon Tools. "
 
This uses CD audio and like you say, needed a four pin audio cable from the CD drive directly to the motherboard. However, this was made redundant with Windows XP as the CD audio would pass through the motherboard.

You can check what is going on with the CD Audio just by plugging your headphones into the CD drive as CD Audio will be output through that. As a workaround if you got a 3.5mm audio cable and plugged that into whatever speakers you're using, as well as the normal PC audio then I guess you could have both!

Also check in your standard control panel that CD Audio is not muted, or disabled etc.
 
Thanks for everyone's kind help!

weylandyutani - The game is classed as abandonware now, so if i get it working, ill be sure to PM you with the VM.

lokiss - Thanks so much, that does ring a bell actually regarding the first available drive letter (i.e. d:\) as the CD-ROM. I think ill spin up a Windows 10 VM tonight and give that a bash! I'd love to have a word with the developer who thought that'd be a good idea... ;)

almoststew1990 - Thanks for the suggestion but did check that. The audio works fine if i play it in a CD player.

scubes - I tried that, but unfortunately its not the same - music completely different.
 
for the running too fast issue have you tried going into task manager, right clicking the process and then set affinity and untick all cores apart from core 0?

it worked when my painkiller game ran too fast on my core 2 duo, turned out it didn't like multi-core cpus lol
 
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