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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:.

The audio designation in the cue sheet does not guarantee that every byte in the range is audio. The image packaged by the GOG 2.0.0.5 installer includes scrambled Mode 1 data-sector bytes at the beginning of track 2 before its audio silence. The scrambled region preceding track 2 overlaps the end of the plain data region and is displaced relative to the sector addresses in its headers. That displacement carries data beyond the cue sheet’s audio start. The data-to-audio transition is not aligned to a 2352-byte sector boundary. Interpreting the overlapping data as 44.1 kHz signed 16-bit stereo PCM produces a brief loud noise; the bytes are CD-ROM sector content, not recorded music.

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

Track selection

Loading a world has two CD steps, at different points:

  1. At the start of the load, before any world data is read, if world_redbook[N] is not -1 and differs from the track the CD is currently playing, the engine stops the CD. The loading screen is therefore silent.
  2. After the world is loaded, if world_redbook[N] is greater than zero and differs from the track the CD is currently playing, the engine plays track world_redbook[N] and applies redbook_volume.

Consequently:

  • A world without world_redbook (or with -1) keeps the current track playing.
  • A value of zero, or any negative value other than -1, stops the CD and starts nothing.
  • 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.

Per-world snapshot restoration follows these world-load CD steps. A revisit uses the live CD track for its track-selection decision. Loading a compatible main save for the currently loaded world skips world setup and its CD track selection. Loading a compatible main save for another world runs world setup before restoring the saved state.

Book menu and movies

Opening the book menu plays track 2 from its start and applies redbook_volume. The startup splash and title play no CD audio.

Every movie, whether the introduction, a browsed Movies page entry, or a movie queued before the next world, runs the same sequence: sound effects stop, the CD pauses if it is playing, the movie plays, sound effects stop again, and the CD resumes if it is paused. The CD continues from where it paused. Movie audio comes from the Smacker stream, never from the CD.

New Game plays the introduction movie and then loads world 0. The book menu’s track 2 pauses for the movie and resumes when it ends; world 0’s world_redbook is 7, which differs from 2, so the world load then stops the CD and track 7 starts only after the world is loaded. No CD audio plays during the load.

The credits scroll (the ending after WonGame, and F10 in a world) stops the sound effects, plays track 2 at redbook_volume, and stops the CD when the scroll ends or Escape is pressed. The last requested track stays 2, so after in-world credits the repetition check replays track 2, not the world’s track, until a world change to a different track.

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.