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Canyon.mid

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Re: Canyon.mid

#201

Post by ahartmetz »

darkwater wrote: post #165
Disposal8433 wrote: post #7

You remind me that I didn't have a sound card at the time and I played all my games (mostly LucasArts) with the PC speaker. For me, the MIDI versions are too boring as they lack the "raw electric power" of the speaker that I loved for years.

I had a completely different experience. The moment we played Monkey Island for the first time after installing our brand new SoundBlaster-compatible cheap soundcard, bought with the money a couple of early teenagers can have, well, it was GLORIOUS. I still remember it vividly 30+ years later.

Same here. The first sound card (also bought with my own scarce money) was a huge improvement. I don't miss the PC speaker one bit. Pinball Dreams (Edit: seems like it was Pinball Fantasies} and a few other games could play somewhat scratchy sounding PCM music on it, that was cool.

Re: Canyon.mid

#202

Post by khedoros1 »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #183
sotix wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly was the difference between PC speakers and MIDI? Why do we no longer need a MIDI device today to play the “correct” sound?

When they say "PC Speaker" they mean that thing that beeps when your computer fails to boot being used to play music, not normal speakers vs dedicated midi device.

Yes. 35 years ago, the family PC-clone didn't have any dedicated audio hardware, just the built-in speaker, and that was pretty common. A couple years later, we got a "Sound Blaster" card (more likely, a clone). That provides a FM synthesis chip (typically used for music), and PCM audio output (for sound effects, voice, video playback) that doesn't require constant load on the CPU (it was possible to output scratchy digital audio on the PC Speaker, but CPU-intensive).

If you've heard music from the Sega Genesis, that's the same Yamaha FM Synthesis technology (details differ, of course).

So, games would often support different audio hardware. Here's a favorite:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IOL4q5tDDQ (Secret of Monkey Island theme, PC Speaker)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qpB-HAZsRs (Secret of Monkey Island theme, Adlib/OPL2/FM synthesis, common option for PC sound hardware)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3dB0qEcG20 (Secret of Monkey Island theme, Roland MT-32/Linear Arithmetic synthesis, premium hardware, likely what the music was originally composed for)

Re: Canyon.mid

#203

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

tgv wrote: post #47

If you like that kind of thing: manufacturers used to create demo songs for synth keyboards and modules: * Emu Proteus 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5FffG_0sqw * Emu Proteus 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4KW9uWCY3A * Roland MT-32: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdSKg5G9MPc&t=22s * Roland D-10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXGdyp7Ml-Y * Roland SC-33: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as_jVNIvleI (complet…

The Roland SC-33 one slaps.

Re: Canyon.mid

#205

Post by Trixter »

vikingerik wrote: post #26
Dwedit wrote: post #19

Yes, I know it's just a "retro looking computer" to frame a YouTube video but... I had to look up the Tandy 1000 RSX, because it seemed very wrong to have 16-color VGA graphics coming out of a computer labeled as "Tandy 1000". Tandy 1000 RSX was the last model from 1991, and it had Super VGA rather than the famous "Tandy graphics" that originated with the IBM PCJr. It did not come with an Adlib or Sound Blaster card,…

VGA on a Tandy 1000 wasn't all that unusual. Most if not all of the earlier Tandy 1000 models that had ISA slots could take a VGA card in them. The hardware worked fine (it's just memory bus accesses under 1mb and I/O port instructions), it just depended on software support to do anything with it. Tandy's magazine PCM often listed and rated add-in VGA cards. I remember reading of a later version of DeskMate that supp…

Most Tandys with 8-bit ISA slots could not take a VGA card because the internal graphics chip could not be disabled. It was only the later series where that became an option.

Re: Canyon.mid

#206

Post by Trixter »

Dwedit wrote: post #19

Yes, I know it's just a "retro looking computer" to frame a YouTube video but... I had to look up the Tandy 1000 RSX, because it seemed very wrong to have 16-color VGA graphics coming out of a computer labeled as "Tandy 1000". Tandy 1000 RSX was the last model from 1991, and it had Super VGA rather than the famous "Tandy graphics" that originated with the IBM PCJr. It did not come with an Adlib or Sound Blaster card,…

While the picture isn't technically incorrect for an MPC level one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_PC) system, it borders on anachronistic because, as you note, many hoops would have to be jumped through. Any 386dx-33 or 486 clone would be much more period-correct.

Re: Canyon.mid

#207

Post by alnwlsn »

browningstreet wrote: post #106
swat535 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the quality of software has dramatically dropped, apps now take 10 seconds to load, memory usage is maxed, games crash and people needed to reinstall their OS so frequently that Microsoft literally added a "reset PC" option.. You can argue that software does much more than before, sure I agree but no one asked for so much bloat and features in every day apps. My note taking app doesn't need AI.

Apps take 10 seconds to load? Which apps, on what system? My whole machine reboots in less than 10 seconds. I haven’t seen a blue screen of death in a decade. I haven’t had significant data loss from a failed drive or a corrupt machine in.. I can’t remember. Even DaVinci Resolve is ready to run in a few short seconds. This is all on a machine I bought 6-8 years ago. I reboot my phone and watch and laptop when I think…

Altium, Solidworks. Altium is "go and get coffee" slow!

Kicad loads in 2 seconds, and FreeCAD in 7 seconds though.

Re: Canyon.mid

#208

Post by bananaboy »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #185
Sharlin wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, of course, because it could play square waves, you could bitbang it to play digitized audio using PWM. Sounded terrible, and super CPU-heavy (so not useful in games), but still.

There were two games that I remember had pretty good sound on the PC speaker, one was a golfing game which had like bird whistles and voices, the other was a 2d side scroller with voice acting, iirc it said "jesus is here!" when you picked up an extra life or something.

Yes! World class leaderboard golf with RealSound!

Re: Canyon.mid

#209

Post by bananaboy »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #197
bananaboy wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just now went searching to see if there were any better quality GM drivers for Windows that let you upload a soundfonts and it looks really dire out there! The one that mainly shows up is VirtualMIDISynth ( https://coolsoft.altervista.org/en/virtualmidisynth ). It seems like it supports Windows 11.

SoundFont® synths were never good. When Creative added this feature to their sound cards, they were trying to provide a cheaper alternative to dedicated hardware synths, but it did not match the quality (though it was still a step up from FM). And in the modern era, this obsolete format has somehow become more popular, now via software reimplementations, because of the catchy name or something? I also want to point t…

If you have a high quality sample pack though it could sound good.

Re: Canyon.mid

#210

Post by timewizard »

brudgers wrote: post #141
timewizard wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can play the guitar parts on a banjo but it ain't going to sound right.

In 1900, QRS began making piano rolls. By 1920, they had invented a machine to capture piano players directly and over the years QRS captured many including Liberace, George Gershwin, and even Roger Miller playing Autumn Leaves . QRS is still in business and some of its product lines use Midi conversions of piano rolls and last month I landed a mixed lot with a bunch of those Midi files on 3.5” floppy disks. I had Ge…

I didn't say it wouldn't sound good. It wouldn't sound right, as in, not what was intended.

In particular, think of how this would play out if you had never heard that song before, would that be what you were after?

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