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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 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.
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
I had the original GUS.
Getting a GUS and SB16 to coexist peacefully under Dos, windows 3.1, and Windows 95 is probably the apex triumph of my dos/win 9x hardware troubleshooting youth.
IRQs, DMAs, and win.ini/system.ini can rot in hell.
On the other hand, I suppose it prepared me for linux...
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
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.