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DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

lenowo.org

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Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

#11

Post by chihuahua »

antonvs wrote: post #7

Terrible headline. I’m not going to click that link because I won’t encourage ridiculous clickbait.

I agree. To explain further, it's easy as an outsider to call somebody else "lazy", but the outsider doesn't know how hard Id worked to finish Doom. Game development is famous for months-long crunch time death marches with 7-day 16-hour days. It's easy to say "you've been doing crunch for 6 months, here's another task for you: add PC speaker music" but it might be the thing that drives the game dev who has to do it over the edge. Are they being "lazy"? Are they just sitting around doing nothing, when they could be working on PC speaker music?

While it might have been possible to add PC speaker music, would it have been worth the effort at the time? How much would it have delayed the release of the game? Would anyone have cared very much about being able to have terrible quality music on their PC speaker?

Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

#12

Post by minki_the_avali »

jasongill wrote: post #4

This 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 a…

Honestly, the design aspect really wasn't something I had considered, It definitively does make a lot of sense. Still sad though that it didn't officially happen. So far, all the arguments I had seen against it where purely about the performance, which in my testing isn't really a big factor for this.

Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

#13

Post by chihuahua »

eahm wrote: post #8
antonvs wrote: post #7

Terrible 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.

John Carmack is not exactly known for being a lazy slacker. In fact, in the past few years he expressed his opinion that people should work longer hours if they're being serious about their work, and has gotten a bunch of push back for it.

Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

#15

Post by russdill »

unsnap_biceps wrote: post #2

While 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…

As someone who grew up on PC speaker, it's actually really good. The main thing is the item sound effects need some tweaking to be less distracting, probably just shorter. It might also do good to just skip certain unimportant sound effects completely.

Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

#17

Post by BearOso »

bitwize wrote: post #6
unsnap_biceps wrote: post #2

While 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.

> Nintendo games even temporarily dropped music voices (typically preferring the second square wave voice, then the first) to play sound effects.

This even happened on the SNES. A few Square games like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6 have tracks that are noticeably missing a music channel when playing sound effects. It wasn't totally necessary to use all the channels, but they were very adamant about their music quality.

Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

#18

Post by Tempest1981 »

antonvs wrote: post #7

Terrible headline. I’m not going to click that link because I won’t encourage ridiculous clickbait.

Original, for the curious: https://web.archive.org/web/20251203002619/https://lenowo.or...

[id Software was Lazy - DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music!]

Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

#19

Post by andrewf »

chihuahua wrote: post #11
antonvs wrote: post #7

Terrible headline. I’m not going to click that link because I won’t encourage ridiculous clickbait.

I agree. To explain further, it's easy as an outsider to call somebody else "lazy", but the outsider doesn't know how hard Id worked to finish Doom. Game development is famous for months-long crunch time death marches with 7-day 16-hour days. It's easy to say "you've been doing crunch for 6 months, here's another task for you: add PC speaker music" but it might be the thing that drives the game dev who has to do it o…

Also all the sound stuff was outsourced! id hired Bobby Prince to make the music and licensed a playback library which seemed to have enough problems already with the supported sound cards. https://doomwiki.org/wiki/DMX

So they'd have had to extract this feature from a vendor where the relationship is already breaking down, or ditch it all and start from scratch with a new vendor, or inhouse code.

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