ADDING AUDIO TO CD IMAGE

Many people have a CD Image of Syndicate Wars which has about 350MB. Such image contains full version of SW, including all animations. It is also multilingual: En-Fr-Ita-Esp-Swe. The only thing that is missing is CD Audio Music.

If you have downloaded audio tracks separately, you can follow this guide to marge them with the CD image.

First, decompress your audio tracks. They are probably compressed into MP3 files. Remember that even a WAV file can be compressed - be sure they are all converted to 44.1kHz 16-bit Stereo uncompressed (PCM) WAVEs. How to convert them? You can use any audio conversion tool, for example Easy CD-DA Extractor. Even WinAMP can do this (using disk writer output).

After decompression, you should have audio files similar to those:

  FILE NAME:                         SIZE:
 swars_audio_track_02_mq.wav        99 860 074
 swars_audio_track_03_mq.wav       105 099 370
 swars_audio_track_04_mq.wav       107 417 194

Now the CD Image file. You must have it in BIN format, not in ISO! Note that sometimes you can download image with wrong extension, for example ISO file which is really BIN, or BIN which is ISO. If you know how to view binary files, you can distinguish the ISO and BIN by looking at its content.


ISO file header (the one we don't want):

  DATA:               OFFSET:    HEXADEXCIMAL:
 ................          0    00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
 ................         16    00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
 ................         32    00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
 ................         48    00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
 ................         64    00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

BIN file header (the one we wish to have):

  DATA:               OFFSET:    HEXADEXCIMAL:
 ................          0    00 FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF 00 00 02 00 01
 ................         16    00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
 ................         32    00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
 ................         48    00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
 ................         64    00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

If you have an ISO image, convert it to BIN. Many programs can do the conversion, for example WinISO. You can also try searching for BIN on p2p networks.

Now, place your audio tracks in the same folder where BIN Image file is. Then, create a text file in this directory. Open it with Notepad and insert the above lines as content:

-------- CUT HERE --------
FILE "syndicate_wars_1997_[no_cdaudio].bin" BINARY
  TRACK 01 MODE1/2352
    INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "swars_audio_track_02_mq.wav" WAVE
  TRACK 02 AUDIO
    PREGAP 00:02:00
    INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "swars_audio_track_03_mq.wav" WAVE
  TRACK 03 AUDIO
    INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "swars_audio_track_04_mq.wav" WAVE
  TRACK 04 AUDIO
    INDEX 01 00:00:00
-------- CUT HERE --------

Make sure the file names matches those you have on disk. Save the file and rename it to .CUE, for example "syndicate_wars_1997_[incl_cdaudio].cue".

If you made everything correctly, you now have Syndicate Wars with CD Audio present. You can check it by trying to play the audio tracks with any CD Audio Player. Remember that you must mount the CUE file, not the BIN image.