The Secret of Monkey Island Shows Evolution of PC Audio 348
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 disagree! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
The Roland MT32 is the best (Score:4, Interesting)
Fun (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Remarkable evolution, and not just sound! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:I disagree! (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
Re:Creative AWE64 Gold, how I miss thee (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6 (Score:2, Interesting)
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!
Obligatory (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
They missed one... (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Fun (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Roland MT32 (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
How about pulse-width modulation (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:GameBlaster (Score:4, Interesting)
...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
Re:That's because the person doing it did it wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [youtube.com].
Real instruments and stuff like that (how quaint).
Re:The real comparison is in music production (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Star Control 2 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Fun (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
You apparently weren't here when we went through this process. I was; my first PC was an IBM PC-1. The only way you could play PCM audio on a machine like that, without a Sound Blaster or similar, was to bit-bang the PC speaker from the CPU. The classic mod player 'mp' offered this as an output driver in addition to SoundBlaster and GUS support. Actually loading and converting a sample even in uncompressed format like 8-bit WAV was too much work to do this gracefully on a 4.77 MHz XT, though. A 6 MHz 286 would do it, but not well. Pretty much any 386 could do it without stuttering, but most people with a 386 had a sound card, and anyway, that's way down the line from the era we're speaking of.
So, back to the good old days. The original 8-bit SoundBlaster card was not only not the first PCM card for PCs, but it only had one output channel and only handled 22kHz audio. But the SoundBlaster and the AdLib FM synthesis card are contemporaries! People were still buying AdLib cards even though the SoundBlaster was available and included AdLib-compatible FM synthesis because it was a significantly cheaper card. It wasn't because they didn't have a use for PCM audio; many games included sampled audio.
Not the right demo : Technicality (Score:4, Interesting)
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:They missed one... (Score:3, Interesting)
Those games didn't always check to see if the correct CD was in the drive, either. I remember once playing a game and I couldn't figure out why the background music was playing depeche mode instead of the normal game music. It wasn't until much later that I realized that it just simply played track 1 of whatever disk was in the drive at that time.
Re:Half-Life with Aureal 3D sound (Score:3, Interesting)
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 owned a lot of sound cards back then. (Score:3, Interesting)
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
iMuse (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Half-Life with Aureal 3D sound (Score:2, Interesting)
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.