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The Secret of Monkey Island Shows Evolution of PC Audio
Normally I don't have much interest in stuff like this, but this history of PC audio is dripping with nostalgia. From the bleeps and bloops of the PC Jr to the Gravis Ultrasound I lusted after while stuck with an Adlib ... it warms the cockles of my old-man heart. Not sure that Monkey Island was the right demo choice, but hey.
That's pretty much my "nostalgia" when it relates to 1980s and early 90s PC Audio. "Ugh". Or "ick". Or "I'm glad I bought a multimedia computer".
I remember debating online with IBM PC fans, and how they kept insisting that the PC had better sound (and graphics) than an Atari 800, Commodore 64, or Amiga/ST. Well I guess they were "invested" and had to defend their PCs, but it wasn't even a close race. Check it out for yourself. A lot of these PC sound effects don't sound much better than my old 1977 Atari console:
Part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cETl8PhUy_E
Part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e4uwzNkUVE
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I picked up MT-32's expanded cousin CM-32L for 7 euros at the local auction site a few years ago. For the less fortunate (those who don't own the device), there's the Munt MT-32 emulator at http://sourceforge.net/projects/munt/
I think the MIDI bank is what makes the difference here. If the composer did his work on soundcard X then it may sound badly on card Y -- because the MIDI banks use different sounds.
most of the time it was the quality of the samples in the midi instrument table.
soundcard tech has not changed much from the first days.... the midi audio sample tables on the other hand....
Honestly, current soundcards utterly suck compared to the better ones from a decade ago.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Secret of Monkey Island also has 3 different PC versions.
1. The original version, using MIDI
2. The 1997 CD re-release using CD tracks for music... but was basically the MIDI version recorded from a Roland device of some sort.
3. The 2009 remake, using digital audio... but it changes music between a version recorded from the original release on an Adlib card and one recorded by a live band when you switch between modern and classic modes.
The remake of the second game is coming later this year, most likely mid-June or mid-July.
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The last one is not "CD quality digital audio," other than that is was probably rendered at 48kHz, 16-bit (which would actually be DVD or DAT, not CD). It was just rendered with a soundfont on a SoundBlaster X-Fi, and not a particularly good one. The quality you get out of a sampler is only as good as the samples you put in.
So it isn't as though this was played by a live orchestra and recorded to CD. It is the same technology as the AWE32/64 stuff, just a larger sample set, but probably not professionally done (there are lots of shitty free soundfonts online).
What would be interesting to hear is how it would sound if given the full treatment of high quality modern professional samples. You find that you can get very realistic, high quality sample sets these days. I'm talking multiple gigabytes for a single instrument. While it still doesn't sound 100% real, you can get some really good expressiveness and realism from it.
If I were at home I'd post a quick demo using some of the samples I have but oh well.
At any rate, it isn't that the MT-32 was the be-all, end-all or anything, it is that the person doing the demo didn't understand what they were doing. Also I suspect the original track was composed for the MT-32. A lot of games in that era were composed for the MT-32, and then arranged for other popular devices like the Adlib.
Xenon 2 Original - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3n6BRUVAl0
Remix - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFkP6xzzTeI
Not bad for a computer from 1985, eh? Notice the near-CD-quality sampling. And here's an overall compilation of Amiga music from the 80s and 90s:
Part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTz5iwmtkrs
Part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5Eoc8VsV_M
Part 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuXVy6qXyuI
Part 4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l6_mS_cnwQ
Music Archive - http://www.paula8364.com/
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But of course, the Amiga was where the .mod format was popularised. For those who are too young to remember, it was a happy combination of samples and note sequences to trigger them. This was used for the best and most varied game music at the time as well as a staple of the demo scene.
The idea of digitized sound through the PC Speaker was around long before Star Control 2 (1992); the earliest game I know of to do this is Czorian Siege in 1983. Of course, it was just a few short clips and was far more limited than what SC2 accomplished but it's an impressive trick and would have been surprising to hear at the time! Access Software used the trick extensively in the late 80's; I think most if not all of their later games supported this. What was interesting about SC2 though was that it took the idea a little further; instead of just playing back a sound clip it actually mixed samples together on the fly to create the music/sounds much like on the GUS version or an Amiga.
When the game-blaster was $500 or so we made our own thank you. :)
I used to get reels of matching resistors and make soundcards for everyone I knew with a PC.
Originally released by Covox, it was simple to make your own, and way cheaper than everything on the market.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covox_Speech_Thing
And here's the SID chip (released 1982). Not bad eh? Certainly beats anything IBM PC or Apple could do in 1982:
Here's Monkey Island on the Paula sound chip (released 1985). Again..... beats anything IBM PC or Apple could do in 1985 or even 1990:
SID - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXizZ7kx_VE
Paula - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DL6HYGwEwM
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starcon 2 used 4-channel amiga-style mods.
NetBSD: the cathedral vs the bizzare.
For a while, the purpose of a sound card was to "accelerate" Direct Sound3D-- and the better the sound card, the more voices could be mixed in real time, and the more precise the placement in 3D space. A good sound card could really take the pressure off the CPU. CPUs have improved since then, and Microsoft changed DirectX, so perhaps they're pointless now.
The problem usually was the GUS's SB emulation. The best bet was simply to disable it, use the GUS in GUS mode for things that support it and use the SB for everything else. I had both cards too, I don't remember anything particularly problematic about getting them both to work.
Was? Tracked music is still alive and well.
I only started making it myself a few years ago.
Sure, but there was a time where it was technically possible to do full digitized audio while developers continued to use synthesized audio. I'm not saying that fully digitized cards were always around, but about halfway through that video the CD quality sound starts to become possible but not done because of limitations in storage at the time.
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But most of those MIDI sucked unless you had high quality. I remember using Yamaha SoftSynthesizer that made a big difference in MIDI! Do those high quality MIDI softwares exist today? I still have some OLD *.mid files I would like to listen under XP, 64-bit Windows 7, Linux/Debian, and Mac OS X. :(
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And it had proper occlusion and reflection. So if there was something outside the room you were in, you could hear the echo of it as it bounced off the wall outside.
Yes, it did require you to give the sound driver a very rough model of the 3d scene, but as you already had a model laying around that you were rendering, it wasn't too difficult to add, provided you were willing to put the work in at an engine level. 3rd party developers who didn't own the game engine they were using relied on the engine provider to add the functionality (Example: Half-Life had it, as Valve had access to the engine and could code it in).
From Wiki[Citation Needed]pedia:
That last sentence is rather telling, as I've yet to see the features that A3D had being advertised in a Creative product.
This is wholly inaccurate. The only reason the Mac didn't have decent sound was because Burrell only put a single-voice DAC into the Mac and Burrell and Hertzfeld didn't have a lot of time to write a decent mixing routine. More details here: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Sound_By_Monday.txt
Jam Session and Studio Session by Bogas were able to mix up to six voices realtime, so decent sound was possible through software.
The alternative now is that I can buy the $100 computer (a p4 with 3gb ram will do great), and a $200 soundcard (an m-audio delta 1010lt). I should have been more clear earlier, but the other $700 would easily rent a nice set of drum microphones (if you're even using real drums, and even then, it's usually easier to get a good sound with triggers - ala Nirvana's Nevermind, Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magic, and just about every other mainstream record you've ever heard), a good vocal mic, and any instruments you may also need (although if you're a recording musician you probably already have that stuff, major label deal or not). To be absolutely realistic, the costs of the rentals you'll need for tracking (and the old carpet you need for the walls) is probably more in the region of about $200, but I tend to err on the side of caution when I make such broad statements. So you could make an album yourself, and after you recoup the $1000 it took to make it, you start earning money on all the hard work you have done in writing and recording your music. Alternatively, you could make an album with a major label, go into the hole with them for $50,000, and start making money for the same amount of work after 30,000 albums are sold. And when you want to make a new album again, the label won't let you unless you've made money on the last. If you had done it yourself, you could not only start creating again in a couple of months, but your costs for album 2 are 30% less because you already have the computer and soundcard you used the first time
Where do I come up with this stuff? I've done it. Several times. Check out dickmacinnis.com to listen to my debut solo album, which I've already made almost $20,000 on to date. The album took about two months to write/record/produce/master, and I'll be able to continue selling it until the day I die. I'm currently working on the follow up.
DickMacInnis.com