alvaro84 wrote:It's sad though that the wavetable was seldom used with custom samples, it could be just as good as the GUS (or more like the Interwave of the GUS PnP with its bigger address space and 44-kHz mixing even at 30 channels). (Could the last two AWE channels be used for anything but DSP effects? Impulse Tracker can't seem to allocate them for actual notes.)
Yeah, would be significantly better than GUS, because of its superior quality sample interpolation, always runing at 44100/16(?) bits(actually, I suspected 14, but my memory could fail me), has low-pass filter with resonance and, of course, chorus/reverb.
I did not test the filter much, but E-MU's resampling technology and digital filters were top-notch back then, at least in their professional hardware. One of several great audio companies Creative bought and exploited.
I programmed my AWE somewhere in 90s, and IIRC, those 2 channels are supposed to be initialized with predefined parameters and are always running, unavailable for music playback. Repurposed for RAM regeneration, and possibly also as dummy voices that allow external stereo input from Yamaha OPL3 chip to be digitally resampled to 44100 and enhanced by chorus/reverb.
I only remember 1 game that used emu8k specifically for sound effects - Eradicator. Depending on available RAM it would upload 0.5-2M of its samples as soundfonts, which would start to sound really awesome. Music, on other hand, was just a single ambient PCM track streamed from HDD through DMA at 22KHz.
This is offtopic though.