Primus 1996 Enchanced CD Reverse Engineering Help? (Kinda Old Flash Stuff??)

[Figgy2112]

So And thinkingsand from the discord have been trying to figure stuff out about this old enchanced CD from the 90s, it’s a CD by one of my favorite bands, Primus (who you may know as the guys who did the South Park Theme)

So here is what we know in a nutshell (more in-depth below): the CD was a enhanced cd which is a cd with extra content which usually just had a couple extra photos and videos and poorly compressed quality expect this one had a whole interactive experience that uses audio directly from the cd, it was made for Windows 3.1/95 and Power PC Macs (System 7.5.2/7.5.3 at the time), and released in 1996, it uses a pretty obscure/undocumented mastering system of mixed mode type 2, most of it was developed in Marcomedia Director 4 (really early flash) with supposedly a proprietary library made for enhanced CDs, also from a couple people I know the 3-D environments were made in something called KPT Brice, it utilizes Quicktime 2.12 and WinG 1.0 for Videos/Graphics, I did have various portions of this disk for years that I could play around with. I finally went out and bought myself a copy and preserved it.
https://archive.org/details/tales-from-the-punchbowl/
It’s a clone CD image and part of it had trouble reading disc so stuff doesn’t work, but I included a Recreatation CCD of The Windows Verison With Remastered Audio in a separate zip

A while ago, I actually decompiled some of the Director Project files of what was out there and extracted about 2000 png assets which are all available in the archive

https://archive.org/details/tales-from-the-punchbowl/

This is also where I got some of my info on the nitty-gritty of the disc

http://www.ram.org/music/primus/articles/tftp_faq.html

So a lot of this nerdy following documentation is about the windows version since we haven’t quite cracked down on the max so a lot of this nerdy documentation is about the windows version since we haven’t quite cracked down on the Mac stuff and logic wise, Windows is just the better option to probably work on

So the way, the disc works Is actually quite simple, it uses the mode 2 mixed media format (more commonly known as CD-extra) where there is two separate sessions on the disc one formatted red book and the other form usually to ISO9660 (this one is unique because it actually has an apple HFS and ISO9660 partition on the data part) and the base of the interactive experience runs off Macromedia Director 4.04 files (basically archaic flash) and utilizes quicktime 2.12 and WinG 1.0 and it has a custom proprietary lingo enhanced cd control xlibrary (directors primary language) made by ion that actually pulls audio from the CD for the experience, hence the really high-quality audio (except for Wynona) It also has some other xlibraries like the one just called dAVe but I have no idea what that does these are stored as .DLLs on the disc.

When trying to figure out what the hell OS or computer this was made on (Director 4.04 you can only really find documentation and archives for the version for Mac but apparently there was a Windows version, but I can’t find any archive anywhere, So it was most likely developed on a 94 to 95 power PC Mac or a high end pc to be honest, probably running windows 3.1 since probably when this would’ve been put into early production stages 95 would’ve just come out, some of the code specified it was the windows version but a few other things in some of the DXRs specified Mac so it’s really unsure which

It is a very advanced CD for its time, to be honest, the tech was ahead of its time since a lot of enhanced discs just had a macromedia shockwave menu, website html and then a poorly compressed video and then called it a day

We know The 3-D environments were made in KPT Brice due to that q&a and some other tips I’ve gotten

Well, we,ve tried to reverse engineer/update this disk to try to get it running on modern hardware properly it is quite hard, pretty much anything other than 9X doesn’t run it because the NT kernal (2000, XP, 7, 10, ETC) completely breaks some of the visuals and you cannot run it on 64 bit OS since it’s actually a 16 bit application but 3.1 to ME can run it properly (but why would you use me?) and I’ve been trying to use the decompiled dir projects in Director but it has been difficult with a bunch of script errors and pretty much only everything working properly in director 4 itself (released in 94) so I have actually attempted to contact some people that worked on the disc to see if I can get any more info, if any of you guys want to try to help me and thinkingsand on this journey of trying to get this thing on modern computers let me know

This has clips from someone I think emulating the disc in a VM for anyone curious what it looks like