DOS games with CD audio

[Fant0men]

Is anyone interested in making releases of DOS games that have CD audio for music, ready to be used with DOSBox?

I noticed GOG tends to pack their DOS games with Ogg Vorbis files, and they have a special CUE sheet that lists the bundled BIN file as the data track, and then the Ogg files as the audio tracks.

That CUE sheet is then mounted from within DOSBox using the 'imgmount' command, and it's recognized as a normal CD with normal audio tracks, even though in reality they are Ogg Vorbis. This is done through a special DOSBox config file, that's executed when using the GOG launcher.

That config file is given as an argument to DOSBox through a Windows shortcut file, but you can make a similar launcher in a simple *nix shell script like this:

#!/bin/bash
# This script runs games in DOSBox.
# You need to change 'dosbox_single.conf', so it looks like this:

#[ipx]
#ipx=false

#[autoexec]
#@echo off
#cls
#mount c .
#c:
#imgmount d "tombraider01_flac.cue" -t iso -fs iso
#tomb.exe
#exit

command -v dosbox 1>&- 2>&- || {
    echo "This script requires DOSBox."
    echo "Install DOSBox via your package manager."
    exit
}

# Get the absolute path of this script, change into it, and run DOSBox.
script=$(readlink -f "$0")
gdir=$(dirname "$script")
cd "$gdir"
dosbox -conf "dosbox_single.conf"

This makes it possible to easily start the games from Linux, without having to type the imgmount command manually.

There's a problem though. GOG is wasting disk space cause of storing the music twice. The CD audio tracks are still present in the BIN file, but the Ogg files are used instead. Kind of stupid, if you ask me. The CD audio is lossless, hence much higher quality than the Ogg files.

DOSBox not only supports Ogg Vorbis for music, but it supports FLAC too! FLAC is a lossless codec, hence the same quality as the CD audio. I prefer to use FLAC myself.

I took it upon myself to create a shell script that can rip the audio tracks from BIN files, and encode them to Ogg Vorbis and FLAC. The script also creates CUE sheets for both formats that are ready to be used with DOSBox.

Even if you're not going to run the games in DOSBox, but you're merely archiving games on your hard drive for some reason, you can save some space by converting the audio tracks to FLAC.

Screenshot

As the screenshot shows, by encoding the audio tracks to FLAC, I'm saving 100MB of disk space for Tomb Raider.

My script stores only the data track in the BIN file. The audio tracks are stripped from it, and only stored as Ogg or FLAC files.

I've tested this script extensively, and I'm confident all the steps are working correctly. The CUE sheets it generates preserves all the information necessary to be able to recreate the original disc layout when burning the games.

So you can be sure copy protection will never get triggered, cause all the information is there.

Disc burning software in general recognizes FLAC files, and is able to burn them as CD audio.

To acquire good copies of games, I recommend browsing the Redump uploads on archive.org. Simply change the letter "A" in the URL to whatever letter in the alphabet you need. You need an account @ archive.org to be able to download the games though.

The Redump crowd have very strict methods when it comes to making copies of discs, and they have an online database too where people can verify that the image files they have are correct.

It's important to note that Redump releases have the various tracks split in separate BIN files. So, you need to merge them to 1 BIN file before running my script. I found a good script for that made by someone else. Though, you could get the same result by using a tool like PowerISO or MagicISO.

We can do better than GOG. Let's teach them a lesson by making torrent releases that are higher quality than their payware!

PS: Another use case for this script could be to merely rip the OST of a game in FLAC, if you enjoy the music and simply want to listen to it. It works with PC games in general, and also PS1 games that use CD audio.

---

Alright. As a proof-of-concept I decided to upload a game I've been thinking about uploading for a while.

To give people an idea of what I mean.

Have fun!

[Fant0men]

I found out that someone else had made a similar tool. Good news is it works for Windows, so maybe it will be helpful to the Windows users out there.

[Fant0men]

Someone tipped me about eXoDOS, which seems to be a collection of most DOS games ever released. They have a torrent linked on their site. Might be useful for those who want to collect DOS games. I've not yet downloaded the torrent, so I don't know if it includes disc images, but if it does that could also be helpful if people want to use my script to make space-efficient torrent releases of DOS games that have CD audio.

I'm gonna upload some more DOS games soon under the 'GaYMZ' tag. I've just been busy with other things. I was hoping the previous DOS torrents I created would motivate others to adopt the same method and upload more games, but doesn't seem like that has happened.

For my last DOS torrent, I created a new Windows launcher for DOSBox, in case anyone needs it.

[RobertX]

Thanks!

[Fant0men]

Thanks!

You're welcome, buddy.

Would like to mention that the script has been improved and updated since I made this post.

Among the improvements is it can now process CUE sheets that contain multiple BIN files (as is the case with Redump disc images), if you use the '-ffmpeg' or '-sox' argument to the script.

I don't think I will make any more changes to the script in the foreseeable future, as it's fast and reliable already.