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

I disagree!

[Monkeedude1212]

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.

Re:I disagree!

[VGPowerlord]

Honestly, current soundcards utterly suck compared to the better ones from a decade ago.

Most soundcards don't bother to include a MIDI wavetable or even an FM synth any more. On Linux you need something like TiMidity. On Windows, you have the MS software synth (I forget its name).

The Roland MT32 is the best

[macinnisrr]

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

Fun

[TheSpoom]

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).

Re:Fun

[mc6809e]

It's interesting; the evolution of PC audio was mostly bottlenecked by storage.

That's not it at all. An Amiga in 1985 with 512k could run Deluxe Music Construction Set using digitized instruments. If you wanted to know what Bach's little Fugue in G-minor with a banjo sounds like, you'd just change instruments and a sampled banjo would be used to play the music.

With just 512k the key obviously wasn't memory.

The key for the Amiga was to have multiple DMA channels, one for each instrument, all fetching audio samples from memory at the same time and each driving a DAC at a variable rate depending on a programmable divisor and combining the results. By playing with the divisor for each DMA channel, you could change the pitch and produce many notes from one sample stored in memory. And with multiple DMA channels available, polyphonic sound was possible. Oh, and because it was DMA driven, very little CPU time was consumed.

The real reason PC audio suffered early on because the PC wasn't meant to play much more than "beep". And early sound cards simply followed the tradition of using synthesis instead of digitization to construct noises.

Remarkable evolution, and not just sound!

[snarfies]

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.

They missed one...

[TrisexualPuppy]

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.

Re:GameBlaster

[Wrexs0ul]

...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

Not the right demo : Technicality

[DrYak]

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).

Re:Half-Life with Aureal 3D sound

[Anaerin]

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?