You don't need FLAC because its pointless to have such format in an MS DOS game.
If you would like to make/find interest into making pixel retro style games better stick to todays technology and various open source engines/developing tools.

Stojke wrote:

You don't need FLAC because its pointless to have such format in an MS DOS game.

And why is that pointless, exactly?

For a decent PCM audio library maybe you could check out MPXPlay. Its audio library (i think it's called MIDAS) supports:

Supported native audio playing: - audio: AAC, AC3, ALAC, APE, FLAC, MP2/MP3, MPC, VORBIS, WMA, WV and CDW (Audio CD ripp'n'play) […]
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Supported native audio playing:
- audio: AAC, AC3, ALAC, APE, FLAC, MP2/MP3, MPC, VORBIS, WMA, WV and CDW (Audio CD ripp'n'play) (with plugins: DTS, MOD, OPUS, SPEEX)
- containers: AIF, ASF/WMA, AVI, FLV, MKV/WEBM, MP4/MOV, MPG/VOB, OGG, TS, WAV, W64
- playlists: M3U, M3U8, PLS, FPL, CUE, MXU
Soundcard (under DOS):
- PCI cards (native handling): SB 16/64/128, Live/Live24, Audigy 1,2,4,LS; CMI 8338/8738; Intel ICH, Intel HDA, VIA 686/8233/8235
- ISA cards (or emulation): SB16, ESS, WSS, GUS, SBpro

MIDI shouldn't be too hard to do yourself. Just push bytes to 0x330 at the right time.

Pointless is a fucking bad word.

Because you can get the exact same quality with other formats for 10x less space.

leileilol wrote:

Pointless is a fucking bad word.

ROFL - yep. 🤣

Stojke wrote:

Because you can get the exact same quality with other formats for 10x less space.

I'd say that depends on your definition of "exact" 😉

lucky7456969 wrote:

Except for Allegro

Allegro is not a game engine; It would be more apt to call it an API. The difference being an API makes it easier to make a game engine by simplifying the process, while a game engine itself would actually have some form of functionality already like loading and rendering worlds or running sprites and whatnot.

As for open source... the funny thing is, a number of shareware developers would actually offer their source code for sale in the earlier days of gaming. The Kroz games for instance had their source code available for a rather large fee, as did several other games. The idea of giving away source code just didn't really exist back then; "Open Source" is a relatively modern concept in computing and didn't start gaining traction until the late 90s, after the days of DOS had passed.

jwt27 wrote:

Stojke wrote:

Because you can get the exact same quality with other formats for 10x less space.

I'd say that depends on your definition of "exact" 😉

You have absolutely no need for extreme fidelity sound in a game, unless its based on sound.
Too much sound takes away focus from other things. Plus having a game whos music files are 5x bigger than the rest of data, when that could have been easily avoided, is a waste of space.

Stojke wrote:

Plus having a game whos music files are 5x bigger than the rest of data, when that could have been easily avoided, is a waste of space.

Tell that to the old CD-ROM DOS games that either wasted entire discs with only 30~ MB of actual data (or worse a game that would fit on like 3 or 5 floppy discs was put on a CD with absolutely nothing else special on it... the horror..), or those that didn't have enough CD audio to "waste" the whole 700 MB of a standard CD-ROM.

if the processor was strong enough to decompress other formats with similar acceptable quality i am sure they would have used that 😀
CD Audio quality is pretty much all you would need. If you didn't complain about pixelated graphics and blurry 3D, there is no need to attack the audio 😀

Stojke wrote:

if the processor was strong enough to decompress other formats with similar acceptable quality i am sure they would have used that 😀
CD Audio quality is pretty much all you would need. If you didn't complain about pixelated graphics and blurry 3D, there is no need to attack the audio 😀

MP3/OGG is not CD quality.
And your comparison doesn't make much sense. 90's graphics may have been low-res, at least they were free of compression artifacts.

Abuse?

jwt27 wrote:

Stojke wrote:

if the processor was strong enough to decompress other formats with similar acceptable quality i am sure they would have used that 😀
CD Audio quality is pretty much all you would need. If you didn't complain about pixelated graphics and blurry 3D, there is no need to attack the audio 😀

MP3/OGG is not CD quality.
And your comparison doesn't make much sense. 90's graphics may have been low-res, at least they were free of compression artifacts.

They were not free of artifacts.

Stojke wrote:

They were not free of artifacts.

Sure they were – or at least, many of them were. They were assembled almost pixel-by-pixel in the likes of Deluxe Paint back then.

But I agree that FLAC would be a very puzzling choice for a DOS game.

I meant as in analogue signal, interference, not so good components on output and so on.
It didn't bother any one there was a little imperfection everywhere.
Thats why there is no need to go all crazy ultra uber FLAC quality sound in games, especially MSDOS games.

What? FLAC decompresses fast in real-time even on a 486 even (faster than mp3 at that - though i've only compared with WinAMP 2.x plugins) - though a well defragged drive works best for that. Streaming wouldn't need a ton of memory.

The 1980's standard of 44khz 16bit stereo is not "uber" and going beyond that isn't "uber" either, but rather wasteful. Using FLAC as a CD audio stand-in is no uncanny anachronism, though it could help if that FLAC music were heavy on the synth and reverb, and quacky overdriven guitars... 😀

The real challenge for attaching a music player is mixing it into the game's sound buffer, and that's something I haven't done for my own engine with DUMB yet 😀

Stojke wrote:

I meant as in analogue signal, interference, not so good components on output and so on.
It didn't bother any one there was a little imperfection everywhere.
Thats why there is no need to go all crazy ultra uber FLAC quality sound in games, especially MSDOS games.

The fact that many sound cards are of sub-standard quality doesn't mean you have to cripple those who do actually own a good sound card...

And keep in mind that "FLAC" does not directly imply "24-bit 192kHz" where every split-second of audio takes 2MB. If you're aiming for the same sound quality as most dos games (8b/22k) you'll still save space compared to the raw PCM most games would have used.

The quality difference between MP3/FLAC is of course highly subjective. Some who do hear the difference are not that much bothered by it. Some, like me, would definitely prefer a crisp 8-bit FLAC over sizzling 16-bit MP3 any day. Just stay on the safe side and don't use lossy compression, unless perhaps you're trying to fit Quake 4 on a set of floppies.

For a good example of MP3 compression gone wrong, try opening one of the Dark Brotherhood doors in Skyrim with headphones on.

Mostly when people talk about flac they talk about its "amazing" high fidelity properties. I my self can tell a lot of difference between an compressed file format and an clarity format, but i can not listen to complete clarity of synthetic instruments for a long time, it starts to annoy me. Noise comes naturally and more pleasing. After some time it doesnt even matter is it more noisy or not, as long as its not completely broken.

I didnt know flac can decompress that well, thats pretty interesting. I should read on more.

jwt27 wrote:

For a decent PCM audio library maybe you could check out MPXPlay. Its audio library (i think it's called MIDAS) supports:

So, does this mean someone out there has actually written a DOS game using the MPXPlay library? I wasn't aware it could do something other than serve as a standalone music player.