James-F wrote:It is indeed a matter of personal taste, but OPL3 sounds way better. :D […]
Show full quote
It is indeed a matter of personal taste, but OPL3 sounds way better. 😁
It's like playing a Cello piece on a Banjo... the notes are the same but the timbre of the instrument is different.
Since the piece was composed on a Cello, you can't just smack the Banjo track with Reverb and Chorus and say it sounds just as good...
... keep telling yourself you like the Banjo more... 🤣
How do you know what a given track was composed on? Did you look up the musician on Mobygames and try to google an old gear list of theirs? For games especially, they would have been *tested* on a variety of machines even if they were *written* on something different.
FGB wrote:it still doesn't sound like the game developers intented the music to sound in DOS games.
How do you know what 'the game developers intended'?
James-F wrote:And if that was the case, you can be 100% sure they did not use a CQM based card.
Again, why do you think you can be "100% sure" about this? Yeah CQM didn't come around until 1995 but lots of good FM music was written after that. And there were other clones & emulations before then.
Ugh, can we put the "argument" that "you're not hearing it as the composer intended!!!" to rest? We generally have no idea what sound cards the composers were using - some of them almost certainly were using AWE32s and 64s because those were the high-end offerings targeted at musicians, not to mention semi-pro stuff like the EWS64. Even OPL2 and OPL3 themselves sound different. Unless you have an exact clone of not only the composer's sound card, but also their amplifier, speakers, EQ settings, signal chain, room acoustics, noise & interference sources and even their ears you're still not hearing any music "the way they did."
HOWEVER, the above is moot because what a good musician or sound designer does is test his or her stuff in a wide variety of playback & listening environments, and make sure it sounds good to as many people as possible. I do this! You think oldschool game devs didn't test on AWE64s and Vibra 16s and fix things when the music sounded 'off'? Even demoscene groups usually tried to test on a few different setups if they could; they would often write what they tested on in the nfo files.
Tl;dr: unless the composer specifically included instructions saying "don't play this on CQM", or "use a real OPL3", or "use a GUS with FM emulation through a pair of Acoustic Research AR15s and a 1960s RCA Victor tube amp ONLY" or whatever, it's awfully presumptuous to think you know exactly "what they intended" and anything else is "wrong." Speaking as a composer myself, they probably 'intended' for people to *enjoy* their music in a way that sounds good to them.
twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!