No music on Lego Rock Raiders?

[Toebex]

Spoiler

 

Hello all, been a while since ive been here.

 

Recently got a high spec Windows XP laptop and I tried to install Rock Raiders from one of my few copies of the game on disc. It installed fine and runs (apart from Rubble Trouble crashing every time) but for some reason, the music only plays when I use one of the disks. I have 4 copies of it, 3 of which dont play the music. I have tried the music fix with no disc and that didnt do anything. It seems the oldest disk I have plays the music, the others dont.

 

Did some of the newer CD copies of the game just not get burned with music files? I have searched through every disk and they all are identical down to every single file. Is this a known issue or am I just very unlucky?

[aidenpons]

The music plays (or at least I think it does) depending on your PC's CD drive. The CDs were made with audio like an audio CD and data like like a data CD. What this means is if you put the CD in your average audio player (not that those really exist in 2022 anymore), it'll be able to play the music. See Mixed Mode CD. Modern CD players just read one or the other and kinda get a bit lost if something has both on.

 

This is also why the disks look identical to each other: Windows kinda doesn't know what to do with these properly, and only displays the data part: and that's identical (assuming you've got the copies with the same DRM - you can tell by the size of LegoRR.icd . If it's 0 kB, then it's DRM-free. If not, you need the CD to play the game). The music actually isn't on the data side of the disk, so you don't see that, and thus it looks identical.

 

That said, what is funny is why one CD works and the others don't. That's something I don't understand.

 

I know you can get the music files off the disk (or off RRU), but I am not sure where they need to go after that. (Data\Sounds would be a good bet).

 

Honestly, your best bet is just throwing them into VLC or something and using that as your media player.

 

 

As for the crashing: That one's actually known! Well, kinda. It's known that it exists and it's a Rubble Trouble problem specifically. The NERPs messaging is set up in a funky way which can often cause it to crash like that. I couldn't exactly tell you why, but there are a few solutions:

• before selecting Rubble Trouble, trigger any other level name sfx
• enable debug keys (-programmer command line parameter) or mod LegoRR1.wad using Wad Recycler in Lego.cfg for EnableDebugKeys TRUE in another level to F12 for NoNerps, exit that level, and load into Rubble Trouble (you'll need to re-hit F12 to disable NoNerps to win the level)
• wait for the briefing to finish
• use -testlevels command line parameter to enable all levels and skip it entirely

It's a sound-related issue, and it seems if you can get other sounds to play properly the game works out what it's supposed to do and stops crashing.

[Toebex]

Seems like such a complicated way to get the music to play but does explain why it doesnt show up on the disc as a file/data. Very interesting. It is weird right? I actually just got a new copy of the game (again) from ebay today and this one runs with the music. Ive tried uninstalling and re-installing with every disc and still, the music only plays on (now) 2 of the 5 discs. I am under the impression, and this is a total guess, that due to the strange way the music is produced to the player, these thrid-party copies of the game just did not burn the music files correctly. The Focus, Reflex and "Classics" version of the game dont play any music. No idea if that is possible, but its a theory. Interestingly I also got a copy of the game Rollcage for PC and it has the same issue. No music at all on the disc. I thought it was a problem with DirectX or my laptop or something but every other game works.

 

Ill give those Rubble Trouble things a go, though I wouldn't be too upset if I had to avoid the mission altogether.

[aidenpons]

4 hours ago, Toebex said:

Seems like such a complicated way to get the music to play but does explain why it doesnt show up on the disc as a file/data. Very interesting. It is weird right? I actually just got a new copy of the game (again) from ebay today and this one runs with the music. Ive tried uninstalling and re-installing with every disc and still, the music only plays on (now) 2 of the 5 discs. I am under the impression, and this is a total guess, that due to the strange way the music is produced to the player, these thrid-party copies of the game just did not burn the music files correctly. The Focus, Reflex and "Classics" version of the game dont play any music. No idea if that is possible, but its a theory. Interestingly I also got a copy of the game Rollcage for PC and it has the same issue. No music at all on the disc. I thought it was a problem with DirectX or my laptop or something but every other game works.

 

Ill give those Rubble Trouble things a go, though I wouldn't be too upset if I had to avoid the mission altogether.

 

I'm curious - could you get pictures of all your disks, and note which ones have music and which don't? You say some of them are third-party copies. Your guess might definitely be right, that when these copies were made, even the copiers themselves didn't know about the music system and thus totally ignored it when re-releasing it.

 

I'm not aware of how one would check whether the CDs actually have the audio on them as an audio CD (the easiest way would be to throw it into a CD player - if you still have one. Any in your car?), but maybe if you were able to confirm that would be very interesting proof.

[Toebex]

You know I think we were right, I couldn't actually believe it. I put the disks in a CD player and wouldn't you know it, the discs with the music in-game played the music and the disks with no music in game didn't play anything. How about that!

 

I took some pictures and videos of the working and non-working discs, not sure if its going to help (can't insert images for some reason)

https://imgur.com/a/RK2ezh9

 

Cheers for helping me get to the bottom of this, has this ever been recognised before?

[aidenpons]

 

9 hours ago, Toebex said:

not sure if its going to help

 

It does, it's really neat to see them categorized and all organized like that! It's super cool to see that the re-releases just, do not have, the music on them. Normally people (myself included) only have 1-2 disks but for you to have 6 in front of you and compare them is really neat!

 

9 hours ago, Toebex said:

(can't insert images for some reason)

It's a lil' clunky, you have to hit the Other Media in the bottom right (just above the Submit Reply button) and then Insert Image From URL. You can also upload them to a gallery on RRU and Insert Existing Attachement, which can be good if you're worried about image sites vanishing on you (less of a problem in 2022 - Imgur seems pretty stable, but a lot of older topics have dead images on them).

 

9 hours ago, Toebex said:

Cheers for helping me get to the bottom of this, has this ever been recognised before?

It's been known that the music system in LRR is weird with the Mixed Mode CDs as I mentioned earlier, and that some devices won't read the audio section properly even if it's there, but what hasn't been known is that some re-releases just don't have the music. Their audio part of the "data & audio" is just... not there, That's a really neat find!

(Okay the Score music and the main menu music will still be there because those are files in the data section. I guess that's why it slipped past whoever was making them - the cutscenes work fine, and the main menu music works fine (actually the main menu music doesn't always work fine, there are two copies of Atsmodel.wav on the disk, one is corrupted and does not work, fortunately the installer installs the correct one but this can be an issue when manually installing) - but the in-level music is somewhere different and doesn't work fine).

 

 

There's one extra thing that's extra funny to me - the disk in the top right of the first image (No Music #4) looks totally identical to Music #2. Even the numbers match up. But there's just no audio on it? Huh.

 

Super neat discovery, thanks for getting so many disks so you could compare them all!

[Toebex]

9 hours ago, aidenpons said:

 

 

It does, it's really neat to see them categorized and all organized like that! It's super cool to see that the re-releases just, do not have, the music on them. Normally people (myself included) only have 1-2 disks but for you to have 6 in front of you and compare them is really neat!

 

It's a lil' clunky, you have to hit the Other Media in the bottom right (just above the Submit Reply button) and then Insert Image From URL. You can also upload them to a gallery on RRU and Insert Existing Attachement, which can be good if you're worried about image sites vanishing on you (less of a problem in 2022 - Imgur seems pretty stable, but a lot of older topics have dead images on them).

 

It's been known that the music system in LRR is weird with the Mixed Mode CDs as I mentioned earlier, and that some devices won't read the audio section properly even if it's there, but what hasn't been known is that some re-releases just don't have the music. Their audio part of the "data & audio" is just... not there, That's a really neat find!

(Okay the Score music and the main menu music will still be there because those are files in the data section. I guess that's why it slipped past whoever was making them - the cutscenes work fine, and the main menu music works fine (actually the main menu music doesn't always work fine, there are two copies of Atsmodel.wav on the disk, one is corrupted and does not work, fortunately the installer installs the correct one but this can be an issue when manually installing) - but the in-level music is somewhere different and doesn't work fine).

 

 

There's one extra thing that's extra funny to me - the disk in the top right of the first image (No Music #4) looks totally identical to Music #2. Even the numbers match up. But there's just no audio on it? Huh.

 

Super neat discovery, thanks for getting so many disks so you could compare them all!

 

You're welcome, I really enjoy these old lego games and it was something I never ever realised when I was a kid. Thought it would be an easy fix but clearly not.

 

I also made another discovery today, a different game with exactly the same issue. Rollcage from Psygnosis for PC. Bought a "new" copy on eBay and installed it. No music at all. Checked the CD files and there isnt even a mention of music anywhere on there so I panicked a little and thought it must be an issue with my computer since Rock Raiders was doing the same thing. After your replies on here, I tried it with a different CD version of the same game (im assuming an older official release?) and it had music on it. Then I thought it might be exaclty the same issue so I put both of the discs into a CD player and as expected, one played music like a CD and the other didn't play anything. So this must have been a common way to get music playing on PC games in that era? This is just something I never would have expected, surely it must be a space-saving solution since the music doesnt even show up as a file on the disk, maybe it tricks the CD into adding more files? Maybe?

 

Also, yes its weird that two seemingly identical disks are actually different, even with the same serial numbers. I double checked and yes, one has music and one does not. Youd think the publishers would check this before shipping them out but they really must not care too much, at least not as much as the OG developer/publisher. What is crazy to me though is that the collectors "Classics" version of the game indeed has no music, youd think maybe they would have at least checked that one?

 

Glad I can add to the LRR community in some way!

[aidenpons]

9 hours ago, Toebex said:

So this must have been a common way to get music playing on PC games in that era? This is just something I never would have expected, surely it must be a space-saving solution since the music doesnt even show up as a file on the disk, maybe it tricks the CD into adding more files? Maybe?

 

Yes, to my knowledge these were fairly common but then kinda stopped existing. I couldn't tell you why they started existing (you could just package the music files on the disk as data - which is what LRR already does with its Score and main menu music), or why they stopped (maybe because of this exact jank? outclassed by DVDs?). I don't think efficiency or file size is a concern here - quite the opposite, since I'm sure you can compress files as data whereas as audio I'm less confident you can do that. A CD still has the same amount of space available on it (about 700 MB), no matter if it's split up into audio and data, or data alone (Or audio alone! Music CDs exist!).

 

All I know is that my Medieval II Total War disk (2006 - DVD, data only) has a warning to not put it in a CD player to try to play its music, as doing so will damage it So it's definitely common for that era, and more than one game does it. (But plenty of games go the data-only route, like Lego Racers 1 or Lego Island 1, which were from about the same time)

 

9 hours ago, Toebex said:

Also, yes its weird that two seemingly identical disks are actually different, even with the same serial numbers. I double checked and yes, one has music and one does not. Youd think the publishers would check this before shipping them out but they really must not care too much, at least not as much as the OG developer/publisher. What is crazy to me though is that the collectors "Classics" version of the game indeed has no music, youd think maybe they would have at least checked that one?

 

That is ... incredibly bizarre. I thought it was just confined to the re-releases but clearly not. Who knows why or who knows how: my knowledge and guesswork totally fails me here.

 

Thanks again for looking into this and documenting it with pictures and everything!