Linux, WINE, CDemu and Mixed-mode CDs – Specifically Total Annihilation

Finally!!!

One of the things that has always made me almost pull hairs is how to get Linux to properly mount mixed-mode CD images so that the images would work the same as inserting the physical disc. In case you don’t know what mixed-mode CDs are, they are discs that contain both a data track and an audio track (usually several). They were quite a popular format in the 90′s with PC games for storing good quality soundtracks before the arrival of acceptable lossy audio compression ala mp3s/ogg.

A bit of background, but Windows was always blessed with image mounting tools, specifically Daemon Tools. On the Linux side however this was not the case. It was always possible to mount CD images to the filesystem, but this only worked well for purely data ISO images. In the case of mixed-mode discs the audio tracks would be forever hidden even if they are stored in the image :(

This has long been an irk of mine as one of my favourite games to resurrect every couple of years is Total Annihilation. This game is simply timeless. Having purchased a copy towards the late 90′s when it used to make my wee old Pentium 100 cry all the way up till now, it still looks and plays like a modern RTS. A true testament to its creator’s (Chris Taylor) vision. One of the highlights of the game is the orchestral soundtrack that provides a wonderful feeling of theater to the gameplay. After switching over to Linux as my main and usually sole OS in and around 2002, it was always a sad thing to play TA via WINE and not have any audio accompaniment. It’s like watching Star Wars without John Williams… seriously!

Having pulled out TA again just recently I set about doing investigations on how to bring back the music. As it turns out Linux has now got a proper CD image mounting tool in the form of CDemu – Hooray! What makes CDemu work is that it is a proper mounting tool whereby the image itself is presented as it’s own CD-ROM device under the /dev filesystem. For all intents and purposes, from the application’s point of view the image is CD-ROM device which means the images work exactly as their physical counterparts do! Does this mean our thousand unit TA battles now have music? YES, IT DOES!!!

We’re going to have to build the packages manually from source unfortunately since they’re not in the normal repositories. I would upload the deb files for everyone, but that would be too easy and WordPress doesn’t seem to provide a file upload feature. Here are the general steps on how to install CDemu on a Debian 6.x (x86_64) system with a little more detail than what’s hinted to by the CDemu notes.

1. First we’re going to need to Debian package building tools,
   $ apt-get install dpkg-dev

2. Next we’ll need the source files of the relevant packages from the CDEmu website. In particular we need to tarballs for:
• vhba-module (20110416)
• cdemu-daemon (1.3.0)
• libmirage (1.3.0)
• cdemu-client (1.3.0) (there’s also a graphical client, but I don’t really care about that)
3. Once downloaded, we’ll need to unpack each tarball, they should all create their own directories, but it’s useful at this point to put all the tarballs into a CDemu directory before hand.
4. First, build the vhba-module by going into the unpacked vhba-module directory and run the Debian build package command.
   $ cd vhba-module-20110416
$ dpkg-buildpackage -b -tc
5. At this point you may get an error about missing dependencies, not to worry, just go through and install all the missing dependencies and try again. once the build is done, you’ll end up at about the following place assuming you do not have the package maintainers gpg key (who would?) It’s okay though as the package did get built and stored one level above the vhba-module-20110416 directory
   $ apt-get install list-of-missing-deps
$ dpkg-buildpackage -b -tc
...
gpg: skipped "Henrik Stokseth (Henrik) ": secret key not available
gpg: [stdin]: clearsign failed: secret key not available
 
fakeroot debian/rules clean
QUILT_PATCHES=debian/patches \
quilt --quiltrc /dev/null pop -a -R || test $? = 2
No patch removed
rm -rf .pc debian/stamp-patched
dh clean --before auto_clean
dh_testdir
dh clean --after auto_clean
dh_clean
dpkg-source --after-build vhba-module-20110416
dpkg-buildpackage: binary only upload (no source included)
dpkg-buildpackage: warning: Failed to sign .changes file
6. At this point you should now have the following deb in your cdemu directory:
   vhba-dkms_20110416-0ubuntu1_all.deb. Congratulations, you’re one package closer to mixed-mode heaven. Let’s install it,
   $ dpkg -i vhba-dkms_20110416-0ubuntu1_all.deb
7. Now we need to repeat the previous steps and build the packages and install for (in this order): libmirage, cdemu-daemon and cdemu-client.
8. Once all those packages are installed we’re almost ready to rock and roll. To simplify things a cdemu user was created with the daemon installation. Let’s add our user account to that group so that we can mount/unmount images without needing super powers,
   $ usermod -a -G cdemu anh
9. Let’s start up the CDemu daemon, no point in waiting!
   $ /etc/init.d/cdemu-daemon start
10. Next we just need to log out of our X session and log back in firstly to let the group addition take effect, but also because the CDemu daemon seems to need it as it is using a session bus (no idea how that works to be fair).
11. At this point, with any luck (fingerscrossed) you should now be able to run the client to query the daemon’s mount status. It should show that you have two possible emulation devices, both of which do not have anything mounted to them.
    $ cdemu status
Devices' status:
DEV LOADED FILENAME
0 0 N/A
1 0 N/A
12. Let’s go ahead and mount something, for example our (my) TA disc image. My image is a Nero image (NRG), but CDemu supports it (it actually supports a lot of formats!)
    $ cdemu load 0 totala1.nrg
$ cdemu status
Devices' status:
DEV LOADED FILENAME
0 1 /srv/media/iso/totala/totala1.nrg
1 0 N/A
$ mount
...
/dev/sr0 on /media/Total Annihilation type iso9660 (ro,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks,uid=1000,gid=1000,iocharset=utf8,mode=0400,dmode=0500)
13. Wow, it’s mounted the disk using it’s CD label and not only that, but it also appears in the dev filesystem as /dev/sr0. Our very own virtual SATA CD-ROM device, amazing! At this point my Gnome desktop environment picked up the TOTAL ANNIHILATION data disc, but also an audio disc and has placed links to it on my desktop. So far so good! The next step is, how to we make WINE aware of this new found goodness? Initially, I thought setting /dev/sr0 to be the D: dosdevice in winecfg to be the answer, but it didn’t work, which was weird. It seems all that we need to do is set it to the actual mount point of the virtual CD-ROM device, in this case /media/TOTAL ANNIHILATION. Once that was done, starting up TA in WINE allowed it to pick up the audio tracks! Success!
    $ winecfg

Well I hope that helps some of you fans of late 90′s gaming who still revisit them from time to time via WINE on your Linux computers :)