Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Although a few brands besides Sega and Nintendo tried compete in this
space, such as Panasonic with its 3DO system, they could not compete on
the same level and soon exited the market.
well-versed composer, familiar with its
limitations, the results could be quite
pleasing. It was when you tried to create
the same sound on PCs that the dii culties
would arise, as we shall see later on.
PC GAMING COMES OF AGE
Although the PC was dei nitely established as a gaming platform, and
its market share increased due to the interest in adventure games, the
development of games for PCs was stuck in a low gear of sorts until
CD-ROM came around in the 1990s. Very quickly after its introduction,
however, developers saw the potential in it and the modern multimedia
movement ascended to another level of sophistication.
Once again, though, there was a catch. We already outlined issues that
sound and music folks faced with CD-ROM, but with the PC there were
numerous models of PCs (and at that time, Macs and even Mac clones)
each with dif erent hardware and software drivers. Due to this, the job
of making music and sound work correctly in this patchwork world was
often fraught with dangers of inconsistency and interoperability.
Some companies making games had no idea how much audio they
could i t on the media itself. Others wanted music but did not know
how to trigger it in the game. Many PCs even shipped without sound
cards, and some of the ones that did have cards had no sounds or drivers
installed on them! And even though standards like General MIDI helped
establish which types of sounds or ef ects could be found at particular
MIDI settings, there was no subsequent uniformity to the banks of
sounds. Each sound device manufacturer would create their version of a
piano, bass, or drumset sound, and the more esoteric sounds like ef ects
could be wildly inconsistent. As a result, music and sound ef ects
often sounded dif erent from machine to machine.
Frustrated with the situation, the audio community united to
push for audio standards such as DLS (Downloadable Sounds),
and 3D audio. In 1992, Roland Corporation released the i rst
General MIDI-compatible audio card for the PC.
This card gave the home user something similar to what
audio developers used. Over the next 15 or so years, 3D sound
for games (also called spatial audio) became popular and
standardized. Pushed forward by increasingly interactive music
and sound design, new standards and tools were developed.
Surround-sound playback and other mixing and mastering
features were added to the hardware and software capabilities of
many game engines.
The Roland SCC-1 was the i rst General MIDI soundcard for
the PC, and of ered comparable high-level audio and musical
performance as the separate SC-55 SoundCanvas module.
Credit:
Austriacus.
