Quake

Having buying all quakes off steam I noticed the music doesn't work unless you have the CD in...
I'm asking which is the best way to play quake?
I want the old school way...the way it's meant to be played...
Is playing through steam really the best way?

Also....mouselook or no?

For mouselook to be always on, type +mlook at the console.

For CD music I don't know, but it surely was an annoying time when games had the music data saved directly on the CD. Other games did it better by saving the music as files (encrypted or not).

Use DarkPlaces. It has support for .OGG based music, so you can rip the music from the CD, plonk it in a .pk3 file and it will autoload.

DarkPlaces is an overkill. It's pretty much like Doomsday for Doom.

Except you can't turn off all the kewl effects and improvements. At least I couldn't.

Quakespasm also supports external music playback.

Mouselook works well with Quake, so it's not 'cheating' like it is in Doom. For instance, mouselook is required to get a secret in the first level! So I'd say it's endorsed, even if not 100% necessary.

Re ports: I haven't found one I'm totally satisfied with, but the following are decent, each in their own way. May as well install all of them, and see which one(s) support your music. (Pardon the Wikia links.)

DirectQ
GLQuake
fitzquake
QuakeSpasm
WinQuake

There's also DOSbox. Archy started a thread about getting Quake to run in it, but it got closed, so I guess just google it. :P

And here's just a big ol' list of them for all the ones I haven't tried.

Da Werecat said:

DarkPlaces is an overkill. It's pretty much like Doomsday for Doom.

Except you can't turn off all the kewl effects and improvements. At least I couldn't.

Quakespasm also supports external music playback.

DarkPlaces allows you to play with a more classic look to it. Should be altered in the settings.

I found this..

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1756923

Anyone tried it....I just installed it now and the music still doesn't work.
I can't play quake without music :(

What files do I need to play it on a sourceport?

http://disenchant.net/tyrquake/

schwerpunk said:

For instance, mouselook is required to get a secret in the first level!

Which secret is that? I play with just the keyboard and can get all of them easily except that one in the little raised house/bunker structure that overlooks the nukage pool. I'm just not very good at precise jumps (should probably just install the grappling hook mod...) Anyway, those other secrets are easy to get if you have keys bound to look up/down and swim up/down.

That ports list doesn't seem to be complete. They don't list QuakeForge, and maybe others. Apparently QF can play music from either the CD or OGG files (never tried it though). Back in the day, I mostly played DM/CTF without music, as it would have just been a distraction. I think a lot of others played that way too.

That ports list doesn't seem to be complete.

Far from it, actually - there are dozens of source ports (and by now even a few more than in the picture).

printz said:

For mouselook to be always on, type +mlook at the console.

sv_aim 1 to disable vertical autoaim and crosshair 1 for a crosshair, too. Neither is needed, but typically if you're aiming with the mouse you don't want autoaim.

PRIMEVAL said:

DarkPlaces allows you to play with a more classic look to it. Should be altered in the settings.

It's still not the most compatible engine, and the OP said they want to be authentic.

I'd really recommend QuakeSpasm in this case, it's a fork of Fitzquake with external music support.

Quaddicted has some great Quake newbie tutorials:

http://www.quaddicted.com/quake/recommended_engines
http://www.quaddicted.com/quake/configuration
http://www.quaddicted.com/quake/soundtrack

For the soundtrack, download quake_music.zip from that last link and extract the ogg files into your Quake folder /id1/music. Both Quakespasm and DirectQ (not sure about DarkPlaces) will have music.

Edit: Not sure how I forgot it, but I wrote this, which explains how to get properly looping music under Vista/Win7 with the official executables (and any others without external music support, provided they still use MCI):

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=113399618

It's a bit involved and I wouldn't recommend it unless you're like me and really want to run WinQuake. If you're lucky enough to still be on XP, you can just burn the tracks to a disc/use Daemon Tools Lite and they'll play fine, just be sure to include a dummy track for track01.

Killamangiro91 said:

I noticed the music doesn't work unless you have the CD in...

That's odd. If Hexen 2 allows people to choose either CD audio or MIDI format, then why doesn't Quake 1 allow it?
Both games are on the same engine. I thought that the only minor differences were in the amount of the colour brown on the screen and in the angles of the models.

But for Heretic 2 on the other hand, which was built on the Quake 2 engine, there is only CD music available without any MIDI.
And 90% of the audio tracks on that CD are utter garbage too. So what I did was I disabled the CD audio completely, and decided to use playlists of external MP3s. So every time before launching the game I open up an external mediaplayer from my Start Menu and load up a playlist of some accordion polka music together with some dubstep beats...
There's just something magical about watching elves twirling around with their bladed weapons to this kind of music. :D

Answer is obvious: Quake doesn't have MIDI music. Engine has nothing to do with it, it's working the same way it always did. id was lazy and just reused their existing executables, which only played music off CDs.

Dragonsbrethren said:

Answer is obvious: Quake doesn't have MIDI music. Engine has nothing to do with it, it's working the same way it always did. id was lazy and just reused their existing executables, which only played music off CDs.

WOW! The more I talk about this, the more I realize just how much better the folks at Raven really were.
Heck, they could've inevitably invented these engines by themselves at a slower and unrushed pace if ID was never to exist. I'm sure of it. :)

Killamangiro91 said:

I found this..

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1756923

Anyone tried it....I just installed it now and the music still doesn't work.
I can't play quake without music :(

What files do I need to play it on a sourceport?

Try these:

http://quakeone.com/forums/quake-mod-releases/finished-works/7337-high-quality-music-packs.html

188DarkRevived said:

And 90% of the audio tracks on that CD are utter garbage too.

I disagree.

Now imagine Quake's soundtrack MIDIfied. I can't.

Dragonsbrethren said:

id was lazy and just reused their existing executables, which only played music off CDs.

I'm sorry, what?

PRIMEVAL said:

DarkPlaces allows you to play with a more classic look to it. Should be altered in the settings.

Just create a folder under QUAKE called cool and copy the pak files into it so that it looks like this.

homer@deep-thought ~/QUAKE1 $ ls -hula cool
total 8.0K
drwx------ 2 homer homer 4.0K Jun 10 19:41 .
drwx------ 7 homer homer 4.0K Jun 10 19:37 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 homer homer   34 Jun 10 19:34 PAK0.PAK -> /home/shoggoth/QUAKE1/id1/PAK0.PAK
lrwxrwxrwx 1 homer homer   34 Jun 10 19:34 PAK1.PAK -> /home/shoggoth/QUAKE1/id1/PAK1.PAK

Then type quake -game cool to play with vanilla behaviour. No Darkplaces gameplay mods.

Da Werecat said:

I'm sorry, what?

I'm not sure what was difficult to understand: The executables on Steam are the exact same ones you'd get if you installed from the CD. They were not altered to account for the fact that the game's soundtrack was on that CD. So when you download the game through Steam, you don't get the soundtrack. This sucks.

id could very well have updated their own games to use external music files, as Valve did for Half-Life, but they didn't bother and it's up to the community to provide gray-area soundtrack downloads and executables that can play them. At the very least they could provide a soundtrack download on Steam, which would at least let you get 100% legal copies of the tracks.

Dragonsbrethren said:

Steam

Now I understand.

Avoozl said:

I disagree.

Errr... Just to make sure, are we both talking about the same CD audio here? Because when I made my last comment I was referring specifically to the one of Heretic 2, rather than the one of Quake 1.
I do not consider myself qualified for commenting on the music of Quake 1 since I have never ever even heard any of it at all, like ever.
... Just making sure that you're not misinterpreting me.