33 replies to this topic

[DracIsBack]

I got this for my birthday one year because I loved Castlevania. It was for my mom's IBM XT which had a basic PC speaker. This is how the game sounded.



The TIA sounded like a symphony in comparison to that 1-voice bleep chip.

[Lynxpro]

DracIsBack, on Mon Feb 28, 2011 4:28 PM, said:

I got this for my birthday one year because I loved Castlevania. It was for my mom's IBM XT which had a basic PC speaker. This is how the game sounded.



The TIA sounded like a symphony in comparison to that 1-voice bleep chip.

And yet the majority of us use computers descended from that horrible platform...

[jetset]

Hmmm...what is it you've said over the years more times than there are Chins in a Chinese phone book?

Quote

Amazing how often people state their personal, subjective opinion as fact.

I would actually agree with that for once. That was bad, but I'd put 7800 Donkey Kong up against that any day. That Castlevania was bad it's true, but I doubt it's so bad as to drive someone to consider suicide after ten minutes. DK 7800 can do that.

[Rex Dart]

Eh, I'd much rather play donkey kong.

Congrats on finding the sole, singular, and only sound system to sound worse than the standard 7800!

[high voltage]

There was actually something worse than the 7800 soundwise


anything on ZX Spectrum actually.
C64 has some awful cat-strangling squeaking sounds too.

Edited by high voltage, Mon Feb 28, 2011 10:13 PM.

[DracIsBack]

jetset, on Mon Feb 28, 2011 9:00 PM, said:

Hmmm...what is it you've said over the years more times than there are Chins in a Chinese phone book?

Pretty sure this isn't an opinion. Unless someone wants to point out the strengths of the base PC speaker sound ...? Just the fact that TIA has two voices over PC speaker's one gives it an edge.

I used Castlevania as an example, but there were many, many, many others.

Quote

That Castlevania was bad it's true, but I doubt it's so bad as to drive someone to consider suicide after ten minutes.

Yeah? Try playing it ...

[gdement]

Quote

Unless someone wants to point out the strengths of the base PC speaker sound ...?

Much more granular frequencies, it can hit a note and play music in tune. But only 1 channel kind of kills it.
Since music is pretty awful on both, what really matters are sound effects and TIA is better for that.

It's too bad the PCJr/Tandy didn't catch on.. or at least I think it is. I've never actually used one, but from what I've read they seem like an interesting adaptation of the IBM for home use. Sound is one of the improvements.

Edited by gdement, Tue Mar 1, 2011 5:37 AM.

[DracIsBack]

gdement, on Tue Mar 1, 2011 5:34 AM, said:

It's too bad the PCJr/Tandy didn't catch on.. or at least I think it is. I've never actually used one, but from what I've read they seem like an interesting adaptation of the IBM for home use. Sound is one of the improvements.

Speaking of that, I used to sneak into the guidance office because they had a Tandy 1000. Castlevania did support the Tandy sound card and took advantage of it nicely. While I was searching their guidance system, really I was playing Castlevania.

[Cebus Capucinis]

"The sound in the 7800 is superior to sound on the XT. It's a scientific fact, let's see who can disprove it!"

[mbd30]

Did your mom's computer have EGA or did you also have to endure the horrors of three color CGA in addition to the crap PC speaker sounds?

[AtariLeaf]

7800 sound never bothered me. This does. There's my scientific comparison.

[DracIsBack]

mbd30, on Tue Mar 1, 2011 9:50 AM, said:

Did your mom's computer have EGA or did you also have to endure the horrors of three color CGA in addition to the crap PC speaker sounds?

Was CGA! That made even more incentive for me to sneak in and play video games on the Tandy 1000 at school. Heh heh

Here's another tune from my childhood on the PC

Edited by DracIsBack, Tue Mar 1, 2011 10:39 AM.

[Lendorien]

Correct me if I'm wrong, there were actually a number of games that used the pc speaker with a lot more flair than this, including digitized music. I can say that there were a good number of games that used the PC speaker to far better effect than Castlevania did.

I was looking for example and came across this. Interesting.

Monkey Island - evolution of PC music

[Emehr]

I remember seeing a screenshot of Castlevania for DOS in Video Games & Computer Entertainment back in the day and thinking how awkward Simon Belmont looked in it. Glad to see (and hear) that I wasn't missing out on anything by having the NES version instead. That sound is absolutely terrible (IMHO, for those that need that to be stated explicitly). DK7800 is really bad but nowhere near that offensive. Actually, if you want to hear a grating Donkey Kong sound, play the tabletop version. It's hilariously obnoxious.

[Rex Dart]

Shoot, even an XT should be capable of spitting out better audio through one of these, right?

Edited by Rex Dart, Tue Mar 1, 2011 11:41 AM.

[DracIsBack]

Lendorien, on Tue Mar 1, 2011 11:04 AM, said:

Correct me if I'm wrong, there were actually a number of games that used the pc speaker with a lot more flair than this, including digitized music.

Mean Streets did later on for sure. But that was a few years out.

[Phredreeke]

Worse than 2600/7800? What about Fairchild Channel F? (three different frequencies with one amplitude IIRC) Magnavox Odyssey 2? (one sound channel, not sure how it compares to the 2600) Emerson Arcadia 2001? (again one sound channel, not sure how it compares either)

[spiffyone]

high voltage, on Mon Feb 28, 2011 10:11 PM, said:

There was actually something worse than the 7800 soundwise


anything on ZX Spectrum actually.
C64 has some awful cat-strangling squeaking sounds too.

Woah, now...don't dis the SID. That was some great sound. If there's games on C64 that didn't sound good, it's because whoever did the sound sucked at it.
The computer itself had a great sound chip. Hell, there are C64 games out there remembered solely for their soundtracks even though the games themselves were crap.

[Stephen]

Cebus Capucinis, on Tue Mar 1, 2011 9:39 AM, said:

"The sound in the 7800 is superior to sound on the XT. It's a scientific fact, let's see who can disprove it!"

Send a shiver down my spine

[kool kitty89]

Lynxpro, on Mon Feb 28, 2011 8:11 PM, said:

DracIsBack, on Mon Feb 28, 2011 4:28 PM, said:

I got this for my birthday one year because I loved Castlevania. It was for my mom's IBM XT which had a basic PC speaker. This is how the game sounded.



The TIA sounded like a symphony in comparison to that 1-voice bleep chip.

And yet the majority of us use computers descended from that horrible platform...

Granted, the sound hardware (for better or worse) had little to no impact on such, and it was better than many contemporaries. (Apple II, TRS-80, Spectrum, etc -the PC at least had the use of an interval timer to drive the square wave rather than pure software driven clicks -like those platforms it had no sound chip to speak of and less sound hardware than the CoCo as such in terms of DAC ability, but with the added hardware timing/wave generation -a shame IBM didn't include a cheap/rudimentary 8-bit DAC port for the PC to work with)

And, of course, like the Apple II you had flexible expansion as well . . . though oddly no sound cards appeared until the late 80s (not counting the improved onboard sound of the PCJr/Tandy 1000), not until Adlib was there any consumer or professional sound accessories for the PC other than the Covox type DACs for the parallel pot. (the Apple II got the mockingboard in the early 80s, odd that the PC didn't get similar accessories early on -especially since the AY8910 could have provided atari style digital joystick ports -which covox did do in 1989 with the AY8930- at a time when the IBM analog ports had hardly become popular -Creative's use on the Soundblaster really cemented that and definitively blocked any other defacto standards -atari type digital ports could have been generally cheaper and less resource intensive to implement than the CPU intensive polling mechanisms used for the analog port, let alone calibration headaches and the many games where analog was less necessary or totally unnecessary)

The Open nature of the likes of the Apple II and PC were things that some major competition lacked. (Atari engineers wanted to push it with the A8 and finally did -more or less- with PBI, but it never really got taken advantage of and the ST was a step back again with a closed box architecture -the Amiga 1000 was only moderately better in that regard -other than the video expansion slot- and largely had to rely on hack upgrades piggybacking on the CPU socket)




But back to the topic at hand: Adlib was alread becoming a widely accepted standard by the time Castlevania was ported to DOS and thus the PC speaker was just the lowest common denominator to support. (not sure if there was a Tandy Specific version -obviously better than TIA, save for some SFX abilities just as the SMS/Colecovision/TI99/etc are vs TIA)


(pretty medocre use of Adlib though, but that's a developer issue, not a hardware one -the C64 version's sound was a bit weak too, but not as disappointing as Adlib given how much more capable than SID it is, or NES sound system for that matter -that was a pretty common problem for DOS games though, mediocre use of the FM synth hardware, though there were exceptions)
Though you've also got some weak examples of the AY and SN PSGs that sound little better than the PC speaker. (Monkey Island didn't support either very well -Tandy or Atari ST)

That and in a few areas the PC speker's use of the onboard 16-bit interval timers means higher pitch resolution than TIA in hardware. (so a few cases where you could do things TIA can't)


(oddly they did rather well with the game blaster)







And to the main topic . . . that's rather obvious in general, LOTS of systems had worse sound hardware than the 7800, but that just means those system were EVEN WORSE off rather than making TIA any more acceptably/competitive for the time. (again, it's rather ridiculous that the PC didn't have a common sound chip add-on by 1984, let alone that it would be until 1987 before that happened . . . you'd think some third party would have offered one of the 2 common PSGs -AY-3-891x or the cheaper/less capable SN76489- fairly early on, but no)

Obviously one didn't by an IBM PC mainly for gaming in the early/mid 80s given the much more cost effective alternatives, and not until the late 80s and early 90s did it really be come an attractive platform with notable exclusives and with the hardware getting more game capable (especially with VGA and sound blaster) and clones getting cheaper/more common in general. (had the Tandy-1000 caught on as a defacto mid-80s standard of sorts, that might have shifted things a bit sooner though)
You probably wouldn't buy an Apple II or TRS-80 mainly for games either, though in Europe you very well may have for a Spectrum 48k (definitely weaker sound than the 2600/7800) but as the lower-end option as such.

mbd30, on Tue Mar 1, 2011 9:50 AM, said:

Did your mom's computer have EGA or did you also have to endure the horrors of three color CGA in addition to the crap PC speaker sounds?

I think that's wrong: many emulators (and indeed many semi-CGA compatible cards) have issues with proper CGA emulation. In this case, I'm almost certain they used the red/brown/black/green palette, but the emulation errors pushed the cyan/magenta/white/black one instead. (you see some contra videos like that as well -the real version is still rather ugly, but not nearly as bad )

That, or they were just crap/lazy developers to not even used the other default palette. (CGA is limited, but it's not THAT limited -you get 2 default palettes, each with bright and dark versions and both the 1 selectable color as an alternate to black)
Given it was a 1990 game that still wasn't supporting VGA, it would definitely be in the lower-end/budget category where they really weren't pushing it. (at least it had adlib, but that's still not saying that much -a few odd games support VGA but not anything but PC speaker sound: I think Stormlord does that, it's also oddly one of the few games to push PWM synth for the title screen -like some Speccy games and Digger on PC in 1982)

Golden Axe got a reasonable representation for a 1990 PC port. (looks better than the Genesis game in VGA, though the adlib sound is a bit medeocre and they seem to use PWM based PC speaker samples rather than Sound blaster DMA PCM -it doesn't halt music for PCM playback though -not to mention some of the mediocre conversions on other computers/consoles of the time)
Well, unless you didn't have a sound card enabled:

vs
(the same is also CPU timing sensitive, so emulators with the cycles turned up too high will get screwy -presumably newer DOS-compatible PCs would do the same natively)
Though it's actually a pretty decent example of PC speaker music. (would be one of those cases where "Music or SFX" options would have been significant )

Edited by kool kitty89, Tue Mar 1, 2011 5:40 PM.

[kool kitty89]

spiffyone, on Tue Mar 1, 2011 2:38 PM, said:

Woah, now...don't dis the SID. That was some great sound. If there's games on C64 that didn't sound good, it's because whoever did the sound sucked at it.
The computer itself had a great sound chip. Hell, there are C64 games out there remembered solely for their soundtracks even though the games themselves were crap.

Yes, but at least the SID was used well a lot more often than the (nominally quite capable) YM3812 of Adlib/SB... Though some people don't like the style of sound/music pushed on the SID in many cases, though that often carries over to many European chiptunes in general. (I know several people who find the fast arps in particular REALLY annoying in most cases, though others where they don't like some of the sounds of the C64 instruments used in general -presumably some of the "buzzy" pulse and saw stuff, but the arpeggio complaint is far more common)
There's mediocre and poor examples of sound on all platforms (even ones with very capable and user friendly sound), but some got it more than others. (and those that had popularity/support focused on one region were limited as well -those with worldwide popularity saw a lot more diversity and, more often than not, those with strong Japanese and European support ended up with better music -and better utilization of sound hardware in general- on average -for arcade computer and consoles)

high voltage, on Mon Feb 28, 2011 10:11 PM, said:

There was actually something worse than the 7800 soundwise


anything on ZX Spectrum actually.
C64 has some awful cat-strangling squeaking sounds too.

Well, anything in-game at least. There's plenty of neat title demos, especially PWM stuff:

Edited by kool kitty89, Tue Mar 1, 2011 6:01 PM.

[wood_jl]

Anybody remember the PC Speaker Driver for Windows 3.0/3.1? It was actually pretty slick, and would play WAV files over that crummy little speaker, better than expected. It was pretty cool for a free download, back in those days.

[The_Laird]

high voltage, on Mon Feb 28, 2011 10:11 PM, said:

There was actually something worse than the 7800 soundwise

anything on ZX Spectrum actually.

C64 has some awful cat-strangling squeaking sounds too.

Oh yeah the Spectrum is terrible

[mbd30]

[quote name='kool kitty89' date='Tue Mar 1, 2011 6:13 PM' timestamp='1299021238' post='2222691']
[quote name='Lynxpro' date='Mon Feb 28, 2011 6:11 PM' timestamp='1298945491' post='2222013']
[quote name='DracIsBack' date='Mon Feb 28, 2011 2:28 PM' timestamp='1298932094' post='2221779']

[quote name='mbd30' date='Tue Mar 1, 2011 7:50 AM' timestamp='1298994611' post='2222384']
Did your mom's computer have EGA or did you also have to endure the horrors of three color CGA in addition to the crap PC speaker sounds?


[/quote]
I think that's wrong: many emulators (and indeed many semi-CGA compatible cards) have issues with proper CGA emulation. In this case, I'm almost certain they used the red/brown/black/green palette, but the emulation errors pushed the cyan/magenta/white/black one instead. (you see some contra videos like that as well -the real version is still rather ugly, but not nearly as bad )
[/quote]

The o.p. says his mom's computer had CGA. Was "Castlevania" that ugly purple or was it red/brown/green?

[MrFish]

TIA was/is a good sound-producer. The only thing was that it didn't make the 7800 sound very advanced in it's day compared with other "consoles" on the market, especially when it came to music. Even POKEY was a pretty aged chip by that time.