Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
CD-ROM SAVES THE DAY?
The 8-Bit 'Secret Sauce'?
Many audio houses at this time
started developing their own special
techniques for converting audio from
high quality (16-bit, 44.1KHz) to low
(8-bit, 11KHz) using lot of fancy (and
expensive) digital compression and
noise reduction tools. It took time and
patience, but you could actually make
8-bit i les sound a bit better (relative
term) by doing this. The secret was in
the sauce and each audio developer had
their own recipe that they swore blew
away the competition. Sound ef ects
were the easiest, but voice-over posed
the biggest challenge and games in the
1990s started to use a lot of voice-over.
We mentioned previously that the invention and adoption of CD-
ROM was a huge advance for games and game audio. Remember
that up to this point we had been dealing with a complete game
budget somewhere around 6MB. Now suddenly you have a lot more
space (650MB to be exact) to store information of all kinds. That's
over 100 times the space of a typical console game!
Although at i rst glance it would seem like a huge improvement
with lots more room for music and audio assets, the game world did
not cater to sound designers' wishes. Although there was dei nitely
more room than before, higher-end graphics and animations took a
lot of that space away. There was another catch that hobbled game
composers and sound designers; early CD-ROM drives were only
one speed and the transfer speeds were a huge issue and often
incurred signii cant delays in streaming that information into the
game environment, again forcing the sound designer/composer
into compensating for this situation. Later CD-ROM models had
higher transfer speeds, easing this situation. Later consoles featured
signii cantly more sound capabilities as well, and in general, specs
were moving up. Increased memory, faster streaming, and additional
storage capacity anticipated the move to DVD storage.
Also notice the quality of the music in
Sports Talk . What you are hearing
is a small MIDI i le that triggers the
YM2612 chip. Besides using the FM
patches from the synths, the chip is also
compatible with what became known
as General MIDI. GM, as it's called, is
a way of ensuring that every MIDI
device potentially has the exact same
basic sounds at a particular setting. For
example, drums would always appear
on Channel 10. Program number 001 on
every musical channel (except Channel
10) would play a piano sound. This
enabled composers to try to make their
soundtracks sound the same way on
dif erent platforms. However, hardware
dif erences of sound engines or dif erent
chips caused MIDI to garner a certain
reputation over the years for 'sounding
bad. But in fact, this is completely false
as MIDI sounds like nothing at all. If
a capable sound chip was used by a
The 3DO console, introduced in 1993, was a notable victim of the volatile game industry.
Advanced for its time, it was also massively overpriced and could not compete with the
cheaper Nintendo and Sega consoles. The company collapsed after three years of dismal
sales.
Credit: Jeremy Engel.
 
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