DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
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DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
1–10 of 81 posts
Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
#2While this is a wonderful technical feat, I think it's not nearly as playable. The video shows that it doesn't mix the gameplay sounds with the music track, so it pauses the music every time to play a sound (gun shot, door opening, item pick up, etc). This is really distracting compared to the adlib driver that mixes them together and so the music doesn't stop/start harshly. And IIRC, the adlib music is quieter then the effects, which also helps the music stay as background sounds. I don't think Id was lazy, just thinking about the full experience.
Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
#3What a beautiful bit of hacking!
This is awesome, and made my day to see :)
It sounded -much- better than I would have guessed!
Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
#4This is a cool technical feat, but I am almost sure that id attempted this and realized that it just was not ever going to sound very good. The PC speaker sound effects are bad enough (which is to say "as good as they can be, but still bad") and sound "cheap", and adding beep-speaker music on top of that would just result in a noisy mess - as evidenced by the video.
The beep-speaker music in Commander Keen was good and fit the theme of the game - but to keep the environment of Doom and the dark and moody feel and not be limited to the dulcet tones of a tiny piezo buzzer was a design decision, not being lazy.
Note that they could have supported Disney Sound Source / Covax Speech Thing style audio (they did in Wolf3D and Keen) but skipped that as well, likely for the same reason - it would have sounded like murky hollow garbage.
You can email John Romero and ask him, he responds to emails - my guess is that he will say "yeah we considered it, it sounded bad, we abandoned the idea" not that they were lazy. If you read about the run up to Doom's release, and the amount of crunch time they were putting in, they were anything but lazy!
Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
#5While this is a wonderful technical feat, I think it's not nearly as playable. The video shows that it doesn't mix the gameplay sounds with the music track, so it pauses the music every time to play a sound (gun shot, door opening, item pick up, etc). This is really distracting compared to the adlib driver that mixes them together and so the music doesn't stop/start harshly. And IIRC, the adlib music is quieter then…
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Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
#6While this is a wonderful technical feat, I think it's not nearly as playable. The video shows that it doesn't mix the gameplay sounds with the music track, so it pauses the music every time to play a sound (gun shot, door opening, item pick up, etc). This is really distracting compared to the adlib driver that mixes them together and so the music doesn't stop/start harshly. And IIRC, the adlib music is quieter then…
A lot of PC games worked this way. Nintendo games even temporarily dropped music voices (typically preferring the second square wave voice, then the first) to play sound effects. If you found it too distracting, presumably the music could be muted.
Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
#7Terrible headline. I’m not going to click that link because I won’t encourage ridiculous clickbait.
Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
#8Terrible headline. I’m not going to click that link because I won’t encourage ridiculous clickbait.
Agree, lazy is the last thing that comes to mind when I think about id Software, I don't like the title either.
Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
#9Terrible headline. I’m not going to click that link because I won’t encourage ridiculous clickbait.
A friend had suggested it after I was struggling to come up with a suitable title and there sadly isn't a way to edit it after the fact.