[sumtechguy]

Many games of that era have this. Usually the first track was the data, everything after was just normal cd audio data. I noticed it with most of my tg16 cd games and a few ps games. Once ogg and mp3 became a thing that sort of went away. Instead of 10-15 tracks you could have several hundred in the same space with similar quality in audio.

[masklinn]

> Once ogg and mp3 became a thing that sort of went away.

I'd assume the issue was rather the game needing the space: the first few CD game generations took 50, 100, 200MB on the disc, so putting the OST in CD format was a nice easter egg. Note that games didn't generally put all sounds as CD tracks, just the actual music.

Once your game starts filling the CD, to say nothing of needing multiple CDs worth of storage, having the OST included is not an option anymore.

[edmccard]

>so putting the OST in CD format was a nice easter egg.

It wasn't an easter egg; it was how the games accessed and played the in-game music (and digitized speech when that was a new, exciting thing). There would be one huge data track and then dozens of small audio tracks. If the game did take multiple CDs, then either (a) you installed all the discs but all the audio was on the CD that had to be in the drive for the game to play or (b) each CD had the audio needed for the levels that were on that disc (I think that scenario was more common on PS1 games, but I could be mis-remembering)

[masklinn]

> It wasn't an easter egg; it was how the games accessed and played the in-game music

Except they never had to do that, even before the MPs, they could always have stored the audio data as regular files on the disk image. Using CDDA just makes things more complicated as you need to reaccess the raw media instead of just reading the data from the filesystem.

[corey_moncure]

In those days CD drives could output the audio as analog or digital signals separately from the data bus, using a cable that connected directly to the sound card for zero-overhead music. Commodity CD drives on the PC go back to about 1992 and playing CD audio would have been prohibitive overhead for contemporary CPUs

[wolpoli]

It was quite surprising for me when I found music from the CD drive kept playing after I shut down Windows 95.

[Ekaros]

It really wasn't so much ogg and mp3. But the fact that systems got powerful enough to run both games alone rather complex task and also decode the music. We often forget just how slow systems in early nineties were.