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Background Music

Redguard’s music is Red Book CD audio, played from the game CD through the Miles Sound System redbook interface. It is not stored in any game file.

The CD

Track 1 is the data track; tracks 2–7 are audio. The GOG release ships the CD as a cue sheet game.ins and a raw image game.gog (2352-byte sectors) in the directory above Redguard\, and its DOSBox configuration mounts it as drive D:.

All 29 shipped WORLD.INI entries set world_redbook, and every value lies in 2–7.

Track selection

When a world loads, if its world_redbook[N] is greater than zero and differs from the track the CD is currently playing, the engine stops the CD, plays track world_redbook[N], and applies redbook_volume. Consequently:

  • A world without world_redbook (or with a value of zero or less) keeps the current track playing.
  • Moving between worlds that share a track does not restart it.

A track number below 1 or above the CD’s track count is ignored.

Repetition

Periodically from the main loop, the engine compares the CD’s current track with the last track it requested. When they differ — the requested track has ended and the CD has stopped — it plays the requested track again. World music therefore repeats indefinitely, with a short pause between repetitions.

Volume

redbook_volume from SYSTEM.INI is passed unscaled to the redbook volume call, which accepts only 0–127 and ignores any other value. The shipped value, 200, is therefore ignored and the CD plays at its existing (default) level.

redbook (SYSTEM.INI [system], shipped on) gates the redbook system; when it is disabled the CD is never opened and no music plays.