Comment by unsnap_biceps

Comment by unsnap_biceps 13 hours ago

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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 the effects, which also helps the music stay as background sounds. I don't think Id was lazy, just thinking about the full experience.

russdill 12 hours ago

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.

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  • wolrah 7 hours ago

    As someone who also grew up on PC speaker, I think it sounds significantly worse than Wolfenstein 3D's PC speaker sound where it of course would be expected to be better than Wolf3D in every way.

    I think they could have made something a lot better by, like Wolf, dropping music entirely from the PC speaker implementation. Focus on the sounds that matter.

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bitwize 13 hours ago

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.

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  • BearOso 12 hours ago

    > 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.

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