The CD in the emulated PC
2026-10-24, the pod-sound session, still later.
Top: the music the game played in the emulated PC, recorded on a sink of its own. Bottom: the first ten seconds of the disc's track 2. The bursts are consecutive pieces of the track: the emulated PC delivers it at about 45% of real time.
The code said little about when POD plays its music. The music is a script, Script1.txt, that plays CD track 2 over and over, and it starts when the game fires FIX.MEG's event 20. Nothing in the code fires event 20 directly. No menu item carries it either: every menu item with a sound plays the menu click. So the question went to the running game.
There the CD drive was the obstacle. QEMU's drive takes a plain ISO, and the VM's ISO holds only the data track. The game's MCI calls had no audio to play. The user suggested loading the image so its tracks play as on a CD player. Inside the guest, CDEmu does that: a virtual SCSI host built for the running kernel (vhba), and a daemon that loads the whole POD2_0.CUE into a drive and plays its audio through PulseAudio. The drive shows both tracks. The music runs from 38:41 to the lead-out at 53:20, fourteen and a half minutes.
With the game on that drive, nothing plays in the intro or the menus. When a race starts, a second stream from the game appears in PulseAudio. It is Wine's MCI cdaudio reading the CD's sectors and playing them itself. Moved to a sink of its own, it is track 2 from the beginning. On one timeline with the game's own sound, the music begins with the countdown's "5", within about 0.2 s. Event 20 is fired when a race starts; most likely the track's "Depart" macro does it, and those macros are not decoded yet.
The recording also shows a limit of the emulated PC. The music comes in bursts, a third of a second of music and then a pause, over and over. Each burst carries on where the one before stopped, so nothing is lost, but the track plays at about 45% of its speed. That is the emulated drive and Wine's playback under emulation, not the game, which only asks MCI to play.
inside.sh cdemu now sets the drive up. The app's stand-in, which started the music when the menus come up, moves to the race start.