71–80 of 81 posts
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Doom is playable (albeit by reducing the viewport to a postage stamp) on a 386; I'd be curious how your patch works on the 386 considering how much worse the graphics performance is on it
In the Doom-era game Rise of the Triad, if you shrink the viewport all the way down to postage stamp size, it displays "Buy a 486!" underneath.
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…
> The PC speaker sound effects are bad enough (which is to say "as good as they can be, but still bad") and sound "cheap" They are lifted as is from Shadow Knights. > which is to say "as good as they can be, but still bad" They could be done better or even way better, it's just that wasn't an important target in any way. Especially considering the performance target of 486DX+ whicih wasn't not a cheap machine in any…
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I know. Experiencing that made me learn about PWM, and I was able to reproduce, harshly, a voice sample on my 2 MHz 8-bit home computer, by bit-banging the tape recorder port's 1-bit output.
You could play music on the C64 by sampling the tape ports 1bit input and twiddling the sound chips volume accordingly. You could of course store the samples too, to play back later, but doing realtime sampling into 64KB of RAM didn't exactly let you store much... And a 1MHz CPU didn't let you do much compression if you wanted to keep up..
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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.
This is just someone cosplaying early 1990s development with the benefit of decades of subsequent OS and software design.
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Doom is playable (albeit by reducing the viewport to a postage stamp) on a 386; I'd be curious how your patch works on the 386 considering how much worse the graphics performance is on it
DOOM was playable on the 486SLC2 with a modestly smaller viewport despite having just a 16-bit bus. It was the one donated IBM box in my high school's computer lab that could play it because Model 25 and 30 286's sure couldn't.
One of my favourite DOS era inventions is Access Software's RealSound™ technology which performed audio modulation of the PC speaker to produce okay sounding audio playback, about telephone quality. The manual hilariously instructs you to hook your hifi system up to the PC speaker, see the last page: https://www.gamesdatabase.org/Media/SYSTEM/Microsoft_DOS//Ma...
Star Control II was released in 1992, a year before Doom, and it was able to play beautiful, rich 4-channel MOD music via PC speaker, on a 80386 @ 40Mhz. Scream Tracker, a music composition software, was able to pull of the same feat, 4 channels of 8-bit voices, in 1990. However cool and useful the PC speaker output was, it was the a hand-soldered "Covox" lookalike, a passive DAC built out of a resistor ladder and at…
I must have built at least a couple of dozen of these for various people.
id Software should have just partnered with a heavy metal band that jointly released an album of Doom music you could put in your stereo while you play the game.
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Star Control II was released in 1992, a year before Doom, and it was able to play beautiful, rich 4-channel MOD music via PC speaker, on a 80386 @ 40Mhz. Scream Tracker, a music composition software, was able to pull of the same feat, 4 channels of 8-bit voices, in 1990. However cool and useful the PC speaker output was, it was the a hand-soldered "Covox" lookalike, a passive DAC built out of a resistor ladder and at…
> However cool and useful the PC speaker output was, it was the a hand-soldered "Covox" lookalike, a passive DAC built out of a resistor ladder and attached to the printer port, which you actually connected to your hi-fi amplifier. I must have built at least a couple of dozen of these for various people.