Pinball Fantasies played on various sound cards

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Pinball Fantasies played on various sound cards

Рет қаралды 4,920

8 жыл бұрын

0:00 - Sound Blaster AWE32 - nice overall quality, low noise, but panned to 100% left and right channels (MOD standard)
4:38 - Covox (resistors based) - Not bad, but could be much better with an IC based version.
9:13 - Gravis Ultrasound ACE - most likely the best of all due to the advantages of GF1 chip, low noise, HW mixing
13:52 - Sound Blaster 2.0 - mono, 22.5 kHz sampling, 8 bit
18:31 - Sound Blaster Pro - stereo, 22.5 kHz sampling, 8 bit, for some reason faster playback then it should be
23:00 - Orchid SoundWave32 - it's hard to find words, how terrible this is
27:43 - PC Speaker - 8bit, mono, PWM driven
(All soundcard records are from "real" hardware, none of them were emulated via dosbox or other sw method)

Пікірлер: 31

@testekull4295 7 жыл бұрын

amazing Pulse Width Modulation programming for the PC speaker!

@neoverload8685 5 жыл бұрын

Back in time i was struggling with memory to get my AWE32 working and heard my pc speaker outputting that ... WTF ..

@comandanteej 8 жыл бұрын

I first played this game on a 386. I was always amazed by the quality of sound they were able to squeeze out of the PC speaker. Not comparable to the usual chirping, zapping, slurping sounds that were called "music" in other games that time...

@OMA2k 4 жыл бұрын

But this technique took away too many CPU cycles. That's why it wasn't used much, especially in graphically intensive games, because CPU time was scarce in those old computers. Not to mention sound quality wasn't great.

@Megacooltommydee 6 жыл бұрын

When I skipped to the PC speaker version, I thought it was a mistake at first. Amazing how they were able to make it sound like there was an actual sound card in there, despite the single voice and basic sounds.

@CLS2086 7 жыл бұрын

I had an Orchid SoundWave32 Studio+SCSI and it doesn't sound like that, you have at least 1 dying capacitor

@Bark777 6 жыл бұрын

Remember playing Skulls N Bones and the music coming from the builtin pc speaker was nothing I have heard before without having a sound card. Then I got the extra ball... "X-x-xtra Ball!" Mind = Blown.

@GWCNS 8 жыл бұрын

hmmm.... I think that your Orchid may be fried. Personaly i didnt had SoundWave32 but as far as i know it shouldnt sound THAT bad. Check if all caps are good or if anything is remotely close to being damaged

@Novous 2 жыл бұрын

It's possible. But the Orchid also has NO OPL2 (adlib) chip, it has an [software?] emulation of OPL2 so the emulation may be crap too. But it's also possible he swapped the sound and that Orchid is the PC speaker. Usually PC speaker emulation had a lower sampling rate that resulted in the "high end" being chopped off.

@RaposaCadela 2 жыл бұрын

How did it sound so high-quality coming out of a PC speaker? I seriously can't understand how by just thinking about it

@Novous 2 жыл бұрын

The PC speaker can be "on or off" (1-bit). But, if your rapidly swing it while its still moving, it cannot move fast enough, and you reach middle positions which gives you higher resolutions. They use a technique called pulse-width modulation. There's even a Linux sound driver for the PC Speaker! Arduinos and raspberry pi's (and other chips) can also use this method to send out audio. [The actual speaker in a PC would sound far worse than what we're hearing because the speakers themselves are usually cheap. But if you then played the audio meant for the PC speaker into a real speaker system you'd get what we're hearing.]

@gustavosantos106 3 жыл бұрын

Incredible :O

@kargaroc386 7 жыл бұрын

The PC Speaker version sounds better than the Covox!

@chrisfratz 6 жыл бұрын

kargaroc386 keep in mind that because the call box didn't have dma access, so everything had to be done through the CPU. So that means if you had a faster CPU the music could be played at a higher sound quality.

@chrisfratz 6 жыл бұрын

I've also heard this being played on a couple's covox clones and no sound much better I kind of get the feeling that his speech thing is dying.

@kargaroc386 7 жыл бұрын

The Gravis Ultrasound doesn't actually play this properly, as it's missing a few notes here and there. This is also the case when you just play the .mod files

@ShwappaJ 2 жыл бұрын

AWE32: Amiga Covox: Basically the exact same as the AWE32 but mono and much worse quality samples Ultrasound ACE: SNES or an edited Microsoft GS SoundBlaster 2.0: Covox but better SoundBlaster Pro: Just like the AWE32 but with less fuzz and more VHS-like quality Orchid SW 32: Sounds like a failed attempt to bitcrunch the Covox IBM speaker: I expected this to be nothing but beeps and bloops lol

@doktoroptimo Жыл бұрын

how can PWM speaker sound that good?

@comiccomedy2404 10 ай бұрын

Coding tricks...

@Alianger 7 жыл бұрын

Are you sure you didn't get the last two mixed up or something? PC speaker PWM usually sounds like in Space Race or Mach 3.

@BramSenders 7 жыл бұрын

I can vouch for the fact that the PC speaker did in fact sound like that! Our family's first PC didn't have a sound card yet and most games sounded awful or had no sound at all -- when I started Pinball Fantasies for the first time I couldn't believe my ears, it was as if an actual radio or something was suddenly buried deep within the computer, at the time I didn't even know computers could make realistic sounds! I remember just idling in the menu and listening to the music because it was so awesome :) Pinball Fantasies is the only game I know that did that.

@Alianger 7 жыл бұрын

Ok, not to be rude but is that something you can check now/recently, or a memory from 30 years ago?

@Alianger 7 жыл бұрын

So 99% of the games you played sounded like shit, but it was worth it because of this one game?

@Alianger 7 жыл бұрын

It seems he did get them mixed up, google "reasons-for-owning-gravis-ultrasound" for a better comparison.

@Schule04 6 жыл бұрын

The reason the speaker sounds so good is that unlike earlier games which used sample playback, this one ran on much better hardware and also had better quality samples - which meant that the quality could be much higher. I believe this game has a "quality" setting for the output, you only get this good sound on 486 or pentium hardware