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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.
I had one of those... shelled out quite a few bucks for it too. Any Sierra game sounded absolutely amazing in it, particularly Leisure Suit Larry. Anyone else remember the elevator music? "... da dum da da dum dum dum dum, wah wah wah wah wah..."
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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.
I had the PnP version. It was beautiful and horrible at the same time. Beautiful sound and horrible driver support.
I LOVED by GameBlaster. Such a major upgrade from the PC speaker. My (rich) friend got the Roland and I was jealous.
Then years later I upgraded to the AudioBlaster and loved it. My (rich) friend got the newer Roland and I was jealous.
Owning a computer is like owning a boat. You're always jealous of the guy in the next slip who has one just a little bit better.
Developers: We can use your help.
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 :-)
Living With a Nerd
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
What struck me while WTFV (watching the f-ing video) is that the music from the Roland LAPC-1/MT-32 and Roland SCC 1 MIDI sounded best to me. From those two cards the music had a 'real' quality to it, as if it was being played by real people rather than a programmed sound card. Of course a lot of that can be credited to the musician(s) who wrote the music for those two cards, but I thought I'd share my observation anyway, moot as it may be :-)
Least impressive music, I'd say, was the modern score. I found it boring and lifeless.
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
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
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 hear they are almost ready to release a functional driver in a few years.
I remember playing this on the Amiga 500. The Killing Game Show had pretty good graphics and a killer soundtrack when it first came out.
During the 90s one problem I had consistently was crappy audio cards with small or otherwise inadequate wavetables, the artist would do their best to make some kickin' sounds and I'd end up hearing semi-controlled garble a lot of the time.
I'm sad to say that because of this most of the time I just disabled sound and played the game with other music playing.
It was only weird when some music synced up to what I was playing, purely by chance.
crazy dynamite monkey
used to buy them for $200 a pop. then i bought a cheapo hercules or whatever and never noticed a difference. built a PC with a soundmax or whatever was onboard and never noticed a difference either. since i don't sorround myself with speakers i don't care
I had cockles: in my heart, too, but once daily Valtrex cleared that right up.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
My favorite early computer music is still from the Amiga version of Xenon 2: Megablast
PC music didn't even come close to what was on the Amiga until like 10 years later!
Yay me! ^^
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.
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Really step back and read your own post, if you sounded like you do now 15 years ago anyone would have identified you as an elderly curmudgeon.
For arcade /pinball games the music in games with BSMT2000 is real good.
The battletoads arcade has much better sound then the console vers of it.
With a surround-sound setup and a Vortex 2 card, Half-Life was awesome!
So, the last thing they show is CD quality sound from 1994 to present. I was at least expecting to see integrated sound on motherboards... maybe USB or Bluetooth devices, I don't know for sure, but there must be something interesting that has happened with PC Audio in the last sixteen years.
Dude. I was already an elderly curmudgeon before I walked out of the high school doors for the last time. While my "friends" were out getting drunk, I was planning for the future. It's worked out well so far.
It sounded aweful in most anything compared with the Roland SCC-1, which IMHO bests the CD quality audio. The maker of that video seemed to be fooled by its slightly newer age.
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!
To me, the FM synth version sounds the best.
I think it's an uncanny valley issue. The MIDI versions are trying to sound realistic without being realistic enough, resulting in that classic and very distinctive GM effect. (Not to mention the traditional problem with any form of GM music in that patch sets are so dissimilar that anything that sounds good on one device will suck on another. Consider that all the MIDI synths in that video are likely to be playing the same piece of music.) And the CD audio version is cheating --- it's just a recording of real people playing real instruments, and what's the point of that? Not to mention that it's damned hard to do iMuse with PCM music.
So, give me those lovely warm FM tones any day, the way Michael Lands intended it to sound!
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
At the time you needed to spend $50,000 to record a decent sounding professional album in a studio. Nowadays you can make a recording on par with the hits of the 90s (at least) on a $100 desktop with a $200 soundcard. And major record labels wonder why we're not convinced that the major pop acts are worth the money.
Either this is one hell of a subtle troll, or you're smoking something crazy if you think a professional recording studio can be replaced with a few hundred bucks in computer equipment. Though I suppose you could use the computer as a microphone stand or a chair, and the packing material as budget sound baffling. And maybe you could find an audio engineer to work for free and bring along all his/her equipment and cabling. That aside, you're on crack.
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Telling us how technology X gives the music more "Transparency in the mid-range while maintaining the depth of the low-end"?
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.
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.
Anyone lost a grandpa?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
But how much fun have you had? And I don't mean "watch the game while drinking an ice cold beer straight out of the fridge", I mean "hitchhike to a festival 300 miles away with nothing but the clothes on your body and a couple of bottles of homemade wine...<Insert six days of madness>".
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Did you notice the word "hits"? A lot of the hits of the 90s can easily be emulated on any home computer these days, there's even software specifically tailored for non-musicians that easily creates generic-sounding popular music. Just add some random vocals about love, hate or some other common pop music theme, run the vocals through autotune and you're about done.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Star Control 2 was amazing - it could to speech & digitized music on the PC speaker without soundcards! For those who haven't played it, it's been open-sourced and you can download it here complete with new remixed soundtracks.
http://www.object404.com
Oddly enough, I'm on slashdot right now because my XP PC laptop's audio isn't working and I didn't have time during my lunch break for the reboot that will most likely fix things. It was working fine earlier. I planned on watching some Colbert Report, but I don't read lips very well, so I came here.
What a long way we've come, indeed... ha!
I would have loved to be a bit of a joke. Finishing the video showing a mothercard with a red circle around a tiny chip. A good end after the really giganteous cards show in the video.
Oh, let me add that Bad Company 2 process all his video in the CPU, because is faster that way.
It seems, that the future for audio will be one of the 64 cores of the CPU dedicated to audio.. or something like that :-P
-Woof woof woof!
It was common for games back then to fallback to the PC Speaker if there was no sound card available. It was also usual to support several types of sound hardware, such as the Adlib, Tandy, GUS, Roland MT-32, and Sound Blaster.
Yes, I was around back then.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
..."bleeps and bloops"? Seriously, I know I'm getting a bit old, but I've been seeing that exact same phrase used in articles about videogame sound and music literally for decades now. Most people who play games today probably don't even remember when the sound was that primitive, because they weren't born yet. At least come up with a different way of describing it!
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
That might be true for a select few one-hit wonders. But perhaps I simply lack the imagination to think of U2, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Madonna, Nirvana, and other "hits of the 90s" bands crowding around a desktop PC to record their latest album. That recording method certainly would have imparted a much different feel to "The Joshua Tree", that's for sure.
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I have fond memories of the PCjr's 3-channel audio. Not only did it produce a unique sound, but it allowed for simultaneous sound effects and music. What was really interesting was that about when consumer-level sound cards really began entering the market a few game developers were getting digitized audio out of PC speakers. The audio was very grainy, but it was nonetheless impressive.
The early versions of that music still appeal to me more than the later, higher quality variations. I think they had more character, kind of like the difference between 2D sprites and polished 3D graphics. The later versions sound more generic to me. And I feel like the melody is buried under the percussion in the later versions.
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??"
Good lord, man. Of course I've had fun. I spent the summer riding around the country on a Greyhound bus when I was 16. Good times. I'm not sure today's 16 year old has the balls to do that (or the maturity). I grew up in the 70s. I probably had more "fun" than is legally allowed today.
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 think what macinnisrr meant were all those "artists" who showed up with some generic dance/love song that just followed the formula for what was popular at that particular point in time. If you look at the singles charts those are the songs that tend to be the majority at any given time. A lot of times these people would get one or two albums out the door, with maybe three or four songs worth listening to.
Not to mention the electronic music craze of the 90's. I'm kind of sad that this went away, while a lot of the mainstream stuff was crap it at least had the advantage of the non-mainstream artists sounding as good as or better than the mainstream ones. Something which just isn't true when it comes to most "regular" music, a lot of times what makes one musician stand out as "better" is simply more time and money spent on the studio recording.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
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
To break even with... what? The cost of your computer? To pay yourself a decent living wage for the hours spent writing, composing, and producing? I mean, you've got a nice soundbite there, but there isn't any context or meaning.
He's exaggerating a bit, but try this to see what can be done with a modern PC.
On a tangent, and a somewhat interesting experience I had...
In 1992 I saved up enough allowance to buy a Sound Blaster, my first sound card. After I made my AUTOEXEC changes I tried out my favorite game of the time, Space Quest 4. What I experience was this annoying ringing that made me stop the game, quit, tweak the settings, reboot and start the game again. This went on a few times until almost an hour had passed.
Then out of defeat I started the game and didn't quit it, only to discover the annoying ring was the beginning of the soundtrack. Mind you, it's an MIDI instrument to the sound isn't as annoying on better sound cards, but on a SB it was pretty annoying, check it out for yourself:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKE4YExWcy8
It sure as hell would be a major improvement over the Madonna albums.
And maybe you could find an audio engineer to work for free and bring along all his/her equipment and cabling. That aside, you're on crack.
And where are you going to find an audio engineer that's any good? They don't exist any more. All the audio "engineers" now are so stupid they compress the music past the point of distortion. How incompetent can you get?
I'm sorry, but these days, the guy's right. You can easily make an album on a few hundred dollars worth of equipment that sounds much BETTER than anything coming out of a "professional" recording studio. Maybe if those studios had competent people working at them, this wouldn't be true, but since audio engineers are all a bunch of idiots, it is.
Yes it's true. In win 31 through to XP you could select the midi you wanted to use.
In Windows 7, you get to use Microsoft's default.
AND THAT'S IT DAMMIT!
I think the CD sounds is to full as in filled. The earlier music has clear notes, there different sounds are seperate. With the CD sound you get the feeling the creator wanted to make sure every single milli-second was filled with something and you get a soft version of the wall-of-sound effect.
The odd thing is that movie music makers also know when to go full orchestra and when to have just a handful of instruments playing. Less can be more.
I still hold a minute silence for the day game music died. When CD tracks from the consoles that never had proper sound hardware crept unto the PC and we got pre-recorded tracks and all the efforts to create music that could switch mood seamlessly were overthrown. Yet another reason console owners should be shunned by polite society.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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 ]
You misunderstand... the year listed is the year said sound device came out, not the year it was recorded. Secret of Monkey Island supported PC Speaker (of various sorts), FM synths, and MPU-401 Wavetable output (used by the Roland cards).
A later version had the audio as CD Tracks of the Roland version instead, and the version released last year has recordings of an actual band instead playing it.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Hardware. Possibly the Daytona PCI (one of their earlier PCI cards)... but I'm not positive on that.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Should have addressed this in my last post...
Although the WikiPedia page for Gravis doesn't mention this, I heard that Gravis was working on a PCI version of the Gravis UltraSound PnP, but its partner (AMD) decided to stop making the Interwave processor it used.
Gravis left the Sound Card industry immediately after.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Successful or not, anyone who has to put the word friends in quotes is not someone to be admired or emulated. You sound like someone who's heading to the gym in 26 minutes.
This made me nostalgic for my Ensoniq Soundscape playing the amazing MIDI soundtrack to LucasArts' Tie Fighter on my first PC, a 75MHz Pentium w/ ~16MB DRAM.
I remember making a sound'card' (DA converter) with some resistors attached to the parallel port of my 386dx. Could it have been Covox?
That depends on what you're thinking of. If you mean produce a master with the same quality as a studio, then no, you sure can't. If you mean produce a master good enough for a throwaway pop hit to be compressed to death, ripped, and played on an iPod such that the primary audience won't know the difference, then you sure can. Most of the quality from the studio recording is long gone by then.
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
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. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
...and for those of us that listen to 8-bit/chiptune revival music, there's always Press Play On Tape and Monkey Island on real instruments!
For much more retro game music remixes head over to RKO.
Anyone remember these for the PC? They looked like a answering machine, and connected via parallel cable, IIRC. I know they were meant to work with Disney games such as The Rocketeer and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but I think they had limited availabilty for use with some Sierra Online games too. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Is it possible to use something like an Audigy 2 to emulate MT-32 on some of the older titles? I was never sure if this was possible or not, and I always wanted to play through some Sierra and Lucasarts stuff using that card. Im not very familiar with MIDI, so forgive me if I sound uneducated in this department.
The Roland LAPC-I sounds absolutely amazing even better than the CD version. The AdLib sounds great, too. It's just the right retro sound.
I was just listening to opl3 music.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deaTzct3mW8
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_YMF262
If you came to my home circa 1994 and suggested playing a game on the PC, here's something you might have heard mere minutes before the game's audio encountered some bizarre, esoteric form of failure:
"S.B.O.S. Installed!"
Things were so much better once I got myself a card with actual Soundblaster-clone hardware in it. For a while I sort of limped along with a crappy Soundblaster clone as my second soundcard, you know, so I could have the wavetable synth for the music but also be able to hear game's digital audio... And then later on I got a Turtle Beach Tropez+ sound card that had the wavetable in ROM and the one card also had the SB clone on it... Never any need to load drivers for it. That thing was glorious, back when I had ISA slots in my computer...
Bow-ties are cool.
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 was blessed with having a father, who after our first sound card became enamored with MIDI Composition and playback; as a result we always had pretty decent sound cards.
We started with a Pro AudioSpectrum 16 card. Came as part of a multimedia kit with a 2x SCSI CD-Rom and a bunch of Shovelware. That thing was rock-solid compatible, and for all the Non-PNPness of the time was extremely easy to set up, as it was all driver controlled. Sound quality was only OK, but that's how it was back then!
We then got a Gravis Ultrasound ACE, to satisfy my dad's wavetable needs. You know, for all of the complaints people had, I never had a problem getting the thing to work with a non Protected-Mode game. And I have to say; that thing made TIE-Fighter AMAZING. And by the time Protected mode got In vogue, the software supported it Natively anyway.
Sound Blaster 32... The sound card upgrade that was so Ho-Hum that we kept the Ultrasound. Sure, the 32 did better at lots of things, but the UltraSound did just as many things better.
We then used an Ensoniq AudioPCI that was included in the new machine (The fact by now we were running Win95 meant GUS support was falling by the wayside, alas.) That thing was so beautiful in it's implementation it's no wonder Creative bought them, otherwise they would have been screwed.
After that came the Live Value. You know, it worked, but this is when sound cards seemed to start to lack the mystical charm they used to have. In fact, my dad stuck with the Live for years, until I went ahead and in a new machine build set him up with a Digifire 7.1.
But to get to the point, if I learned one thing in all of this, it's that most Creative stuff is overpriced for what you get, and some of the underdogs make some truly remarkable products.
Let's see... there are two synthesizers, which are not that different from MIDI soundcards. The guitar sounds way too weird and unnecessary. The only difference from computer sound is drums and high hats.
Now that is truly differnt.
Pinball Fantasies (1994) had an amazing sound driver which would play multi-channel MOD files through the PC speaker, of course it also supported sound cards. It also attempted to play digital audio through an Adlib card.
And even now you get cheap audio with cross talk and bad DACs. Its stupid but I still use a SB Live Player to play audio, just for the DAC really. Fortunately my PC speaker setup accepts coaxial SPDIF. That makes life much easier.
I remember once I extracted the MIDI files from TIE Fighter (ahh good ol' days poking around things with a hex editor). The music for the menus/etc. were some 30-odd regular length pieces (minute or two long)
The actual in-flight music, on the other hand, was something like 60 or so (I don't remember exactly how many, maybe more?) pieces, about 5-15 seconds long each, which the game would stitch together with some sort of logic (afterall, only certain phrases will sound right following other phrases of the music) to provide the background music while playing, which would of course attempt to match the action which was happening at the time in-game.
The effect was quite neat, but something like this requires a lot more work on the part of the composers and everyone else working on the game to make sure that the action and the music match up properly as well.
I'm pretty sure there was some element of randomness to it as well, since I remember flying around after having completed a mission, listening to the music which played indicating you were done, and listening for a good 20 minutes or so trying to figure out where it was looping or such, and not finding it. While there was a certain sequence in that one phrase of the music would follow another, it seemed like it would randomly pick what to play next at times.
I really miss stuff like that...
-- Silhouette
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh_RgvmO3bQ and my favorite: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiYuq6Ac3a0 Aaaaah... good times.
I still remember the first midi file I heard - Axel F. Pretty much blew my delicate young mind. I remember thinking, how the heck could a computer make awesome sound like that?
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.
The fact is that Roland MT-32 / LAPC-1 were for long time be-all end-all of PC audio. In fact most game music was composed for this particular synth was exactly because the alternatives were SO bad and the composers, being musically oriented people, wanted something that didn't sound like absolute crap. It's not like MT-32/LAPC-1 ever was that popular. And Sierra's Larry 3 theme sure made you soil your pants on Roland after cheap tinny synth-sound of Adlib/Soundblaster..
This is actually one lost piece of computer history. As far as I know, there is no real emulator for MT-32 which can reproduce the customized instruments possible with that synth and used extensively by composers. Even if you have the (copyrighted) original ROM, it just gives you the stock samples, not the customization, unless there's an emulator for the actual syntheziser chip.
PC sound was really stagnated for really long time, much thanks to creative's absolute domination of the market. GUS was a brave attempt at a paradigm shift but ultimately fell flat on it's face, only to be reincarnated by creative copying the concept with AWE32 and such. With Win95 standardizing the audio interface, Creative came up with EAX to again get a stranglehold of PC audio. It wasn't until Vista made soundcard a commodity DAC with no special hardware caps used at all that the sound card scene became open. Unfortunately it also made lowest common denominator (AC'97 with digital out) de-facto standard. As far as I know, if you want to have fancy audio processing, it has to be all done in software now. Not that it REALLY matters when everyone has at least dual core with majority of games not using the 2nd core (3rd, 4th..) core for anything much.
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