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.

Comments

That's because the person doing it did it wrong

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Ugh.....

[theaveng]

I agree completely, but for some reason I've yet to fully understand, the teeming masses all bought DOS machines... and now here we are.

According to Ars Technica, the top-selling computers purchased by "the masses" were the TRS-80, Commodore 64, and Amiga 500. The reason IBM PC/DOS/Windows came to dominate is because (1) Radio Shack and Commodore failed to innovate and upgrade the hardware, (2) cheap cloning of the IBM PC put them literally everywhere, and (3) businesses bought nothing but PCs.

1994-95 was the watershed year. Atari went bankrupt, Commodore went bankrupt, and Apple almost went bankrupt as well. Apple was saved by its dominance in the schools (first Apple IIs, then Macs), otherwise it too would probably be history.