Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

Wavetable synthesis, seriously.

So, Sound Blaster AWE 32 and various wavetable daughter boards eventually brought wavetable sound to the masses, and then non-Creative cards like Diamond MonsterSound MX300 and Turtle Beach Montego Quadzilla followed Creative's example to feature wavetable connector. Alas, it was also the time when Redbook Audio (and soon MP3 audio) was replacing General MIDI in games. Soon, nobody cared about MIDI anymore. 🙁

I agree. I remember the terrible letdown I felt with games like Crusader: No Remorse and No Regret when the option of General MIDI was removed with the "improved" digitized soundtrack. Yes, it gave everyone a consistent experience, but it sounded muffled and lifeless IMO. I'm trying to remember other late DOS titles that went this route, but drawing a blank. By the time games transitioned fully to Windows-only, MIDI was gone.

Is it any wonder we talk so much about MIDI in games on this site? Even many of Phil's videos are themed around MIDI music in games.

I think that the wavetable synthesis didn't flop, but was superseded (as with FM synthesis). MIDI music was superseded, also.

Let's talk about wavetable synthesis... when do you think it started? I think you're mixing things, because Amiga had some form of wavetable synthesis. MOD music was wavetable synthesis (it was software or hardware based?), GUS music was wavetable synthesis and so on. Also, it was present (and it is still present) on a number of musical instruments. OK, you may say nobody uses it anymore on PC games but I don't think it flopped. It was only bad luck that the price dropped (and find its way into every consumer sound card) just about the same time that CPUs had enough power to play games and decode mp3 at the same time.

About MIDI. Another flop? That's another technology that was maturing for years and musicians still use. It was used almost from the first PC games, but it didn't really sound good on every sound card. And yes, it was superseded by CD music and mp3 music.

What about FM synthesis? It was used in games much more time than wavetable synthesis, but not as long as MIDI. FM music was used on most 8-bit computers and consoles that had dedicated sound chips (i.e.: SID, AY-3-8192, etc), and was abandoned about the same time as wavetables, so I don't think it was really a flop.

And thinking about that... both Crusader, Jazz Jackrabbit, Epic Pinball and Pinball Fantasies used MOD music (or derivatives). As I said, it's a software form of wavetable synthesis (unless you had a GUS, in that case it's hardware).

What do you think about 3Dfx and Glide? Do you consider it flopped or was superseded?

3Dfx cards were popular during some years, and helped some technologies to flop (i.e.: NV1), so I don't think they're exactly a flop. But it seems that their chips were not scalable and failed when technology moved into 32 bit graphics (and sunk when confronted to T&L cards).

Glide was "inspired" by OpenGL. I guess it was still a viable API at the moment 3Dfx dissapeared. Obviously, DirectX catch the 3D API market because it could run (or crawl) on any 3D card, but... do you think it got superseded when 3D cards could do OpenGL without problems?

Soon, nobody cared about MIDI anymore. 🙁

MIDI was and is used where it belongs: in composing music.

It's just that it became irrelevant for an average PC gamer: all games now use digitized music, first as CD-Audio tracks, later as compressed mp3 (and such) files. MIDI might or might not have been used in its production.
This way you hear the music "as intended" and not limited to MIDI alone.
As a result, home-use soundcards became dummy DACs integrated onto PC's mainboards, and not much else.

Zup wrote:

What do you think about 3Dfx and Glide? Do you consider it flopped or was superseded?

Superseded of course. How can you call 3Dfx a flop? It was a huge seller, very successful and made a lot of money for 3Dfx.

When we say something "flopped" we mean it did not do as good as it was intended, and generally the success was inverse proportional with the investment (in either R&D and/or production) and marketing. 3Dfx graphics cards (and Glide) qualifies for none of those.

The Voodoo5, though, was a flop. It was basically Netburst (power hungry and inneficient), but without its saving graces (modern features/intruction set, better underlying platform than the competition, etc.), and got owned by the competition.

Oh, here's another one... Pixel Qi LCDs. They technically entered production, but every design win that they got itself didn't enter production.

The power efficiency and sunlight readability of a monochrome display, with color when you have the backlight on and brighter than the surroundings.

The cd32 never had a chance to prove itself. Shortly after it came on the market Commodore went out of business. And due to a lawsuit in the us. It never had a change there.
That said, most of the games that came out wheren't that good either, a lot of quick releases of games already on the market, with added multimedia to fill the disc. But hey, most games that are released shortly after a console hits the market aren't know for being great.

Zup wrote:

I think that the wavetable synthesis didn't flop, but was superseded (as with FM synthesis).

Well, if you're talking about wavetable-based PC sound cards, then I would say the GUS was the only card with moderate success.
And it was mainly a success in the demoscene, not so much in games (games often had poor or no support for the GUS, which meant that most gamers stuck to their SB-compatibles).
Other cards were either too expensive, or arrived on the market too late (eg SB AWE, by which time games were moving to CD audio already).
So in my experience, wavetable never truly became mainstream, it didn't really replace FM synthesis as the main sound technology in PC gaming.

2.88mb floppies - wouldn't call it fascination tho

I don't think wavetable MIDI was a flop. Virtually every game supported it. It had an excellent run (especially if you consider the MT-32 as the point where it all started) until CD-ROM became popular and music could be shipped pre-recorded.

An actually flopped tech's hallmark is the very low support it gets. MIDI music had big support from developers.

What was a flop in gaming was Yamaha's XG extension. The games that supported the extra effects and sounds can be counted in, uh, two or three fingers? 😵

realnc wrote:

I don't think wavetable MIDI was a flop. Virtually every game supported it. It had an excellent run (especially if you consider the MT-32 as the point where it all started) until CD-ROM became popular and music could be shipped pre-recorded.

An actually flopped tech's hallmark is the very low support it gets. MIDI music had big support from developers.

I agree - adoption rates and availability are the tell IMHO. There are many techs mentioned that fall into this category such as SuperDisc, DVD-RAM, HVD, perhaps even HD-DVD - anything that was hard to get then (or was exclusive to business use due to cost) and is even harder to get now. MIDI devices / games / software could not by any means be considered as 'scarce'.

realnc wrote:

(especially if you consider the MT-32 as the point where it all started)

Which I don't.
MT-32 is LA synthesis, which I consider to be related but not equivalent to wavetable synthesis.
I also don't consider the MT-32 much of a success in itself. It was too expensive for the average user. It had decent support in games (partly because Sierra promoted the MT-32 itself), but I don't know of anyone who actually used it.

Digital8. You could use cheap Hi8 tapes, but store 13GB of data on them! At the time it meant you could back up your entire $300 hard drive on a $5 tape, assuming you had a Digital8 camcorder of course. MiniDV eventually filled the role and the tapes came down in price but by then hard drives had grown so a 13GB tape wasn't quite so spectacular. I always wanted a 5.25" Digital8 tape drive for my PC...

datacasting

The thought of connecting up a PC to an antenna & downloading stuff through via the TV signal is a pretty neat thing even now.

Teletext I suppose was the prototype - but why did we never go further than this?

kreats wrote:

datacasting

The thought of connecting up a PC to an antenna & downloading stuff through via the TV signal is a pretty neat thing even now. Teletext I suppose was the prototype - but why did we never go further than this?

Because it's 1-way communication. You can only receive and not send. If you fail to receive a few bytes, the data becomes useless. With 2-way communication you can request re-transmission.

clueless1 wrote:

I agree. I remember the terrible letdown I felt with games like Crusader: No Remorse and No Regret when the option of General MIDI was removed with the "improved" digitized soundtrack. Yes, it gave everyone a consistent experience, but it sounded muffled and lifeless IMO.

Those two games belong to a relatively small group of titles with a digital soundtrack that's mixed at runtime. This approach is highly sensitive to the mixing frequency, which at that time would have been 22kHz or even lower for software mixing that was performant on hardware of the day.

Play them on Gravis Ultrasound with hardware mixing though, and you get up to 44.1kHz CD-quality mixing depending on the number of active voices.

The majority of post-MIDI games used CD audio which obviously didn't suffer from these problems. Other notable exceptions are Unreal/Unreal Tournament, but by then CPUs were able to software mix at 44kHz without breaking too much of sweat.

Scali wrote:

The claim you made was literally "huge success".
The Amiga was a "moderate" success at best. But as I said, given its technical merits it should have obliterated the market. It barely made a dent.

May I ask where you live? Absolutely EVERYONE had an A500 back in the day. From my friends alone more people had A500 than C64 and I think it's still the most sold home computer we ever had (over 200.000, Sweden 500.000). According to Amiga Format in UK half of all the computers sold then were Amigas (including PC's). When you look at the demo compos from ASM 92-95 you can see Amiga dominating the field in most categories. From northern Europe to south and east it was THE gaming/music/drawing/coding machine to own in the early 90's. Only sim freaks and kids had their PC's and consoles.

clueless1 wrote:

I agree. I remember the terrible letdown I felt with games like Crusader: No Remorse and No Regret when the option of General MIDI was removed with the "improved" digitized soundtrack. Yes, it gave everyone a consistent experience, but it sounded muffled and lifeless IMO.

I never understood why their soundblaster driver performed so poorly. Infact not even Terra Nova does 16-bit mixing. When you play Crusader's music in an actual tracker (ImpulseTracker's SB16 driver is a good example) it sounds incredibly better than anything gamewise at the time.

Of course if you had a Gravis Ultrasound, hardware mixing the music pretty much is the best quality possible all-round.

That's one thing I wish was more apparent in games these days. Sequenced music rather than streams. Only time I ever hear such music is the odd GameCube title and handheld games. But even handhelds have streamed music in some form or another. I know the games I plan to make in the future are going to use music made in ImpulseTracker (the REAL ImpulseTracker under MS-DOS) rather than pre-recorded streams...

sf78 wrote:

May I ask where you live?

NL.

sf78 wrote:

Absolutely EVERYONE had an A500 back in the day.

Not here.
Before I got my Amiga, I only knew two other people who had one. After I got mine, a few more of my friends got one as well, but most stuck to PCs.

sf78 wrote:

When you look at the demo compos from ASM 92-95 you can see Amiga dominating the field in most categories.

But that is not representative of marketshare (heck, I'm member of DESiRE myself, which is a Dutch Amiga demogroup). As I said, the Amiga was the sweetheart of programmers. Goes both for game programmers and democoders (back then the difference wasn't very large anyway).