This was actually just how CDDA music tracks worked in almost all CD games in the late 90s. :)
replyTony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2 got more play in my car than they ever did in my Playstation.
replyHOLY SHIT THOSE SOUNDTRACKS WERE JUST CDS?!
replyTHPS and Crazy Taxi had some of the best soundtracks ever compiled.
This was very common at the time. I suspect there was a technical reason, maybe freeing up the CPU and memory from dealing with music and offloading that to the CDROM drive.
replyIt was just a standard way to play CD-quality audio tracks (by actually playing CD audio tracks!).
replyThere's a reason you used to have a separate four-pin cable going from the CD drive to the sound card ;)
replyDue to the way computers cost a fortune back then, you could skip huge parts of hardware changes in the space of a few years. I must have skipped over that part and jumped from no CD audio (or CD-ROM at all) to, everything over IDE.
replyNever knew about the 4 pin link.
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replyStrictly speeking the was a seperate track with the game, the music was just in the native Audio CD format.
replyThat was standard practice in the 90s. Track 1 on the CD is the data track, and subsequent tracks are standard CD audio tracks that happen to be played in the game.
replyIf the game didn't require accessing data on the CD after installation, you could even swap the CD with a different album and listen to what you want.
The term for that is "Mixed Mode CD": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_Mode_CD
replyHow many hours did you play when you found out you can dismiss the "computer updated" notification?
replyAKA redbook audio
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