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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.
Not sure that Monkey Island was the right demo choice, but hey.
I remember playing The first 2 when they first came out, with all their beeps. Then I remember playing them in '99 for kicks on a laptop. And I remember playing them a couple years ago for the nostalgia.
Each and every time the audio was different (though only slightly for the most recent attempt). Its crazy how hardware changes could make such a profound difference, since I assume its all the same audio code just getting executed differently. It's funny, because in '99, I thought I had mixed something up with the audio setup because it didn't sound right. No that was just how it was SUPPOSED to sound on a good audio card.
IMHO, listening to these side by side, that Roland MT32 is better sounding than even the cd-quality digital audio. How about that sweet marimba lead line? DickMacInnis.com
It's interesting; the evolution of PC audio was mostly bottlenecked by storage. We had the ability to playback full waveform sound back in the day, but we didn't have the storage capacity for it until larger hard drives and CD-ROMs came about.
The reason that cards like Adlib were popular and in widespread use is because storing the notes of a song and using whatever music banks were available on the user's card was cheaper (storage-wise) for game developers than storing a full waveform audio track and playing it. We had waveform sound effects, of course, because they're short and thus small (though some early soundcard-using games even simulated that through the card's music banks).
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I was a Commodore guy in the 80s. One of my friends had an IBM PC, and I would laugh at how primitive it was - CGA graphics and that horrible blatting from the speaker! But what REALLY got me was that he had to insert a DOS disk to load another program! I mean, just imagine - the Commodore you just turned on and it was ready to roll into action. It wasn't until many years later when I saw a system with VGA graphics and a Soundblaster - and I was still on my Commodore 128. Ooof. How theonce mighty fell.
I remember how amazing the AWE64 Gold was...worth every penny I spent on it way back in the day. I still have the glossy cover that came on the front of the box, it's hanging up in my gaming room :-)
When we were dating, I bought my wife an AWE64 for her birthday with a MIDI capable keyboard w/ cables and some MIDI software. She was pissed. She saw it as me buying her computer equipment, much like Homer buying Marge a bowling ball. It wasn't until years later that I explained that it was the best gift I had ever given anyone. She was a music major and I was a computer geek. This hardware would have allowed her to create her own symphonies if she so desired, right there from my living room.
The gift was the perfect "marriage" of our talents but she was so pissed that I didn't dare explain the hint until many years later.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
My first card was the Sound Blaster 16 (non-ASP). Bought over the Pro Audio Spectrum 16. Later I got the Roland Sound Canvass Daughterboard, an obscure card that plugged right into the SB16 and greatly improved the MIDI quality. Creative offered the WaveBlaster which was similar.
Came with a ton of software including:
DR. SBAITSO!
That's the second oldest monkey theme I've ever heard!
My Pro Audio Spectrum 16 sounded great, when I could get it to sound at all. Half the time I had to use SB/Adlib compatibility modes. Had a bitch of a time trying to get it to work on later games, eventually traded up to a SB.
These days I barely even think about sound cards, I suppose because they're now basically just fancier and fancier amplifiers and mixers. I suppose the home sound studio and audiophiles will always want the next new shiny, but there's only so much innovation you can do with audio data before you have to modify the output devices. You have to wonder how Creative stays in business, I can't think of a significant advance in sound hardware in many years that wasn't fully dependent on your speaker setup.
"Not all who wander are lost" -- JRR Tolkien
As a child in 1993, the version that I had on my 486 had CD AUDIO. About 2% of the CD was game data, and the rest was music, the way that they had to do things before computers were powerful enough to do audio compression but when people were becoming tired of MIDI. You could listen to the audio tracks from the CD player if you started up Windows 3.1. All of the sound effects/music in Monkey Island were absolutely beautiful. Good luck finding actual CD-quality music in games today!
And by the way, the "1994-now" "CD quality" snippet is not the same game music that I had in 93. I kind of wonder which version he got it from and what format it came in.
I still have my MT-32. Got it hooked up to my Roland Fantom as part of my music studio. It's fun to throw some of those sounds into the mix once in a while. It actually still sounds pretty darn good for what it is.
And yeah, Leisure Suit Larry! Loved the music from those games.
I remember there were games which managed to generate very impressive sounds from the good old PC speaker using pulse-width modulation. It was pretty impressive when you suddenly heard _real_ sound from your PC speaker for the first time. I was like "what the hell is going on??"
...and 20 years from now you'll retire and he'll be the one with the PS8 :)
The circle of life. I remember my mom upgrading her home PC (lawyer + WordPerfect = revolutionary then) back when I was scrounging family member's office throw-aways. Now she's got a 4 year old dell laptop compared to a dozen racks of 2U's.
For all the complaining I'm glad she didn't just buy me a system though, I'd never have learned the insides (and the programming using them) without her.
-Matt
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What would be interesting to hear is how it would sound if given the full treatment of high quality modern professional samples.
Not quite what you meant, but pretty close: PPOT - Monkey Island.
Real instruments and stuff like that (how quaint).
He's exaggerating a bit, but try this to see what can be done with a modern PC.
I have to agree and glad someone else commented on this. This has been the only time in my PC experience that I have ever been awed by PC sound - similar to being awed by graphics from Doom and then Glquake. Star Control 1 had midi music, but after I bought SC2, my college roommate and I were astonished by what we heard. Digitized music (Amiga mod style) coming from a game that came on a few 1.44MB floppy disks, not to mention that the music was good and I still load them up sometimes.
Not sure that Monkey Island was the right demo choice, but hey.
I disagree
There's a technical problem in this demo :
Monkey Island was designed at a time when *General* MIDI didn't exist yet and MT-32 was considered the nec plus ultra.
As such its music was composed with that plat-from in mind and make extensive use of its capabilities and special features (uploads a lot of instrument patches, etc)
So it's a good demo for MT-32/LAPC-1 (because that's what the music was composed for).
And it's a good demo for everything that came before (because during production the musicians and programmer spent a great deal of time making sure that the music plays well in reduced quality. Note for example the emulation of polyphony by using arpeggios in sound cards lacking enough channels, like PC-Speaker's Mono and PCjr's 4 voices).
But it's a BAD EXAMPLE for everything that came after-ward :
Monkey Island simply saw a quick General MIDI patch, which enabled it to play on general midi synths by mapping the MT-32 soundtrack's (custom) instruments to their (stock) GM equivalent.
So NONE of the cards shown afterward are used at their full potential, although using better synth technology (Wavetable synthesis for most of them) they simply play the GM approximation of the soundtrack.
The over-all quality is so-so : stock instruments of recent card with wavetable sound better than the linear arith. synthesis of MT-32, but the General MIDI sound track lacks the customisation uploaded to the MT-32 by SysEx commands. (It would have been better if the GM enabled version did upload its own samples bank into the wavetable. Saddly not possible using strictly GM commands).
(With perhaps the exemption of Orchid sound cards which feature full MT32 emulation instead of instrument remapping as in other "MT32 modes")
For a *real* progression of quality, the demo should have featured the Amiga version of the game (4 sound channels only, but sample based synthesis, so indeed an improvement of quality),
and the later VGA enhanced talkie version of the games (uses a CD soundtrack).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
It amazes me that Aureal A3D still is more detailed and acoustically correct than the latest revision of EAX. Proper occlusion and reflection on 3D-positioned sounds in A3D Vs. varying levels of reverb in EAX. Why did Creative win that particular battle?
I bought a good number of sound cards over that period.
I started with a cheap Soundblaster clone called the Thunderboard. It offered Adlib compatibility, which was enough for games music. The card was somewhat noisy when playing audio and not always compatible. It did, however, have native drivers with Windows 3.1 when that finally appeared.
The next card was an early wavetable card from Orchid. I wanted a Roland but couldn't afford one, so went for this thing instead. The card supported the GM sound set, but also roughly emulated a Roland device. It also emulated Adlib playback, but had severe compatibility issues when it came to playing back wave audio.
A few months later I acquired a Soundblaster PRO. Finally I had stereo PCM, but also updated the FM synthesis to OPL3. Finding games that supported OPL3 was tricky, but when they did appear the sound was phenomenal, with big 'farty' bass sounds.
Eventually my old PC became obsolete so I upgraded to something new. That came fitted with it's own adequate Soundblaster 16 clone from Opti, but went back to OPL2 for FM. It lacked any wavetable facilities onboard, but had a slot for a daughter-board that offered the feature. Unfortunately I could never find anything to fit that slot.
Then I picked up a Yamaha XG wavetable board that was probably the last in wavetable technology. The XG soundset added many more instruments to GM, together with a whole other set of parameters that could be tweaked. By then, of course, most games were abandoning external music sources, so it was only really used for other projects. I've still got this card at home, but lack anything with an ISA slot to fit it to.
I'm pretty sure I also picked up another cheap Soundblaster clone around this time too, as the card originally fitted into the PC wasn't compatible with the latest version of DirectX requited by one game. Again
What this video doesn't tell you is that MIDI could allow pacing of music to the action. MIDI could allow for real climaxes and transitions between different passages depending on the kind of action; a good sound card could give you, in many cases, a better experience to a pre-recorded digital piece.
Great examples: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and X-Wing.
I don't know...
I mean, in X-Wing, you'd normally be flying around and if there were enemies around, you'd hear the "Millennium Falcon vs. TIE Fighters" music. And then if you destroyed a target you'd get a little triumphant musical phrase thrown in there for your victory...
One of the problems here was that it didn't distinguish targets. You'd get the crescendo even if you just destroyed an immobile, unarmed cargo container with no shields.
And there were missions where you had to destroy like 30 of those damn things... So you'd wind up hearing those two "triumph" phrases, alternated one after the other, nearly back-to-back sometimes...
Not to say the system couldn't be made better, but sometimes I think it's better just to have good background music in a loop, and don't worry about matching the action. You can match music to film because you can control the timing of film through editing... That's just not true of a game.
Bow-ties are cool.
I concur. EAX at that time wasn't even a 3D sound technology, it was cheap annoying echo and nothing more. I remember trying A3D in jDoom engine - it was amazing! Playing Heretic with only two speakers, I could tell that monster was behind, above and left of me. Even later surround systems could not achieve that. Yes, with surround you can probably tell if something happened behind you or left of you, but you can never distinguish if something happened above you.