Methods of Music Reproduction

[Great Hierophant]

I would like to explore possible, alternate methods of music reproduction on the PC.  Lets start:

Intel 8253/8254 & 8255/8042
PC Speaker

TI SN76496
IBM PCjr.
Tandy 1000
IBM PS/1 Audio/Joystick Card

PSSJ
Tandy 1000 RL, SL, TL, RSX

LPT DAC
Covox Speech Thing
Covox Voice Master
Disney Sound Source
MSound Stereo LPT DAC

Phillips SAA 1099
Creative Labs Creative Music System/Game Blaster (x2)
Sound Blaster 1.0

MOS/Commodore 6582 (SID)
Innovation SSI-2001

General Instruments AY8930
Covox Sound Master

Yamaha YM-3812 (OPL2)
Adlib
Creative Labs Sound Blaster 1.0-2.0
Covox Sound Master Plus
Covox Sound Master II
Thunderboard
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Pro 1.0 (x2)
Pro Audio Spectrum (x2)

Yamaha YM-2164 (OPP)
IBM Music Feature Card

Roland LA Synthesis
Roland MT-32
Roland CM-32L
Roland CM-64
Roland CM-500
Roland LAPC-I

Yamaha YMF-262 (OPL3)
Adlib Gold
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Pro 2.0
Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16
Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE32
Creative Labs Sound Blaster 32
Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE64 (emulated)
Pro Audio Spectrum Plus
Pro Audio Spectrum 16
Microsoft/Windows Sound System

Roland GS
Roland RAP-10 (w/GM patches only)
Roland SCD-10/SCB-07 (w/GM patches only)
Roland SCC-1
Roland SCD-15/SCB-55
Roland SCP-55
Roland CM-300
Roland CM-500

Gravis GF-1
Gravis Ultrasound
Gravis Ultrasound MAX
Gravis Ultrasound ACE
Gravis Ultrasound Extreme

Yamaha XG
Yamaha DB50XG
Yamaha SW60XG
Yamaha SW1000XG
Yamaha WF192
Yamaha PCC10XG

Yamaha YMF-278B (OPL4)
Logitech Soundman Wave
Yamaha Soundman Edge SW20PC
Yamaha OPL4 ML

E-mu 8000
Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE32
Creative Labs Sound Blaster 32
Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE64
Creative Labs Waveblaster 2

AMD Interwave
Gravis Ultrasound PnP

Most of these devices also allow the playing of digitized data, but I have not categorized them unless it is the exclusive method by which the device can make music.  I have not included professional music devices unless they were clearly marketed to computer users (the MT-32 is among the few examples.)  I have not included modern PCI devices unless they purposely use older technology.  I do not include midi devices or devices supporting midi because midi is a standard and does not produce sound on its own.  Finally, I have concentrated on what games used or would have used.  

Feel free to add to the list.

[Cloudschatze]

I would like to explore possible, alternate methods of music reproduction on the PC.  Lets start:

Start by rhythmically slapping the desk, like this:
WAP, WAP, WAP, WAP

Add some human beatbox effects (Like "push", without the "u"):
WAP-WAP, PSSHH, WAP-WAP, PSSHH, WAP-WAP, PSSHH

Now, for that floor-thumping bass, get kickin' it oldskool style on the PC (literally):
WAP-PSSHH-WAP, PUNT, PUNT, WAP-PSSHH-WAP, PUNT-A-PUNT

Sometimes, you can even get the PC to make a cool scratchy-vinyl sound. I did once. Lucky!!!

[Cloudschatze]

On a more serious note, I believe that the original Pro AudioSpectrum also has dual OPL-2 chips.

Are you wanting to include those pesky, little-supported cards like the Innovation SSI-2001, Covox Sound Master, etc.?

[Great Hierophant]

Are you wanting to include those pesky, little-supported cards like the Innovation SSI-2001, Covox Sound Master, etc.?

Yes, as both were supported by a few, a very few games.  I made a few other additions as well.

[Laust]

Can anyone actually provide proof that the Innovation card made it past the concept stage?

[Cloudschatze]

Can anyone actually provide proof that the Innovation card made it past the concept stage?

You've probably already seen this, but this is the most I've ever read of it:
http://museum.gravisultrasound.net/articles/ssi2001.htm

It is also supported by Ultima VI, for whatever that's worth.

[Great Hierophant]

If the picture on the Sound Card Museum matches the description given above, then MobyGames is partially wrong.  There is only one SID chip on the card in the picture and the press release states that you can use two cards for "psuedo-stereo sound."  (I don't know he means by "psuedo", as each chip would drive a speaker, giving true stereo sound if the data sent to each is different.)  

Ultima VI supports both the Innovation and the Covox Sound Master, about which even less is known.  All I know if that the AY8930 chip was an advanced version of the more famous AY-3-8910 chip, but what improvements it offered I don't know.  

I find it ironic that Ultima VI can play SID music on a PC but not on a Commodore 64 (game slow enough as it is.)

[Cloudschatze]

Additional OPL-2 cards:

Thunder Board (1x)
Pro AudioSpectrum Plus (2x)
Pro AudioSpectrum16 (early versions) (2x)

[Ari]

Question:
What is OPL-4 exactly? Is it still FM technology?

[Laust]

Can anyone actually provide proof that the Innovation card made it past the concept stage?

You've probably already seen this, but this is the most I've ever read of it:
http://museum.gravisultrasound.net/articles/ssi2001.htm

Yes, I read that years ago. Not exactly conclusive proof, given that no one has been able to find a card or even a better picture than that old magazine scan...

It is also supported by Ultima VI, for whatever that's worth.

Well, Martin Galway worked for Origin for a while and would certainly have been more than capable of writing a driver. However, that doesn't necessarily make it so (it would be interesting to ask him, though...). MobyGames lists several games which support the "Innovation Sound Standard", the first one dated two years earlier than the announcement! I have to wonder how accurate all this information really is, because it doesn't add up.

I'll be convinced if someone manages to actually find a card or if Ultima VI's (or one of the other games) sound driver can be determined to do something that looks like writes to a SID chip.  Maybe NewRisingSun could take a look at that if he didn't dislike SID music

I find it ironic that Ultima VI can play SID music on a PC but not on a Commodore 64 (game slow enough as it is.)

It plays better on the C128, the extra RAM and speed doing great deeds. A floppy fast loader (eg. JiffyDos) is almost a must too

What is OPL-4 exactly? Is it still FM technology?

In part, yes. It's a combined FM and wavetable chip with capabilities similar to the AWE/GUS. You can probably find tunes if you search for "Moonsound", the name of a reasonably popular OPL4 based sound card for the MSX.

[shad0wfax]

I didn't know that the good ol' SID (MOS 6581) was also available on a PC card. It's just a bit curious and funny, because at that ancient times we the C64 owners always criticized the awful pc-speaker sound when compared to the (then excellent and today still interesting) SID chip.

Regarding the OPL4 chipset, I think that this is the technology used by the SY-series of yamaha synths (late 80's), which combine PCM and 4-op FM synthesis.

[Great Hierophant]

OPL4 sounds like OPL3 + wavetable synthesis.  I don't think the FM Synthesis portion of the chip is any more advanced than the older OPL3 chip.

As for the Innovation SSI-2001, if the press release is accurate, it should be possible for a programmer to "recreate" the Innovation in software.  SID emulation is quite advanced and I am sure there are several cores available to us.  According to the press release, the Innovation, like the Adlib and Game Blaster, is a "dumb" device that relies solely on I/O ports for programming.  It should be simple to determine which I/O ports the device used (or was supposed to have used) and have the program in question send the data to the emulated SID and hear what happens.  

As for the Covox, I would investigate whether MAME emulated the AY8930 chip.  If so, they would know about it and its abilities.  

Its interesting that three out of four of the prevalent, early 80s sound chips, the SID, the TI, and the AY all found their way to the PC in one form or another.  All that we are missing is a POKEY.

[shad0wfax]

You're right, there are already very good emulations of the SID chip, such as the one used by "sidplay 2". The emulation is very accurate (I owned a C64 for several years and I find virtually no differences in sound), and it emulates not only the original SID chip (MOS 6581), but also the "new" SID chip used by the newer model C64-C (MOS 8580, a bit different in sound character). So it seems that it shouldn't be very difficult to make a SSI 2001 card emulator.

[Great Hierophant]

I wouldn't be surprised if the Innovation used the 8580, which I believe outputs a somewhat cleaner sound but certain 6581 hacks (i.e. the "fourth voice") won't work on it.  But the C64C did come out before the Innovation was likely to have made its debut.

[NewRisingSUn]

Call me ignorant, but I never understood the hoopla about that oh-so-great SID chip. I always thought SID music sounds like Techno on helium, and not being a fan of Techno, I was never impressed by SID tunes, and those fast arpeggios that many SID composers use to simulate chords make me recoil in horror. Am I a philistine here, or did I just listen to the wrong tunes? I listened to that Galway and Hubbard stuff with Sidplay2 and wasn't impressed.

[Great Hierophant]

I do like several of Galway's and Hubbard's tunes as well as the other major composers found in the HVSID collection.  But I do think that SID music is overrated for three reasons:  

First, the good SID music is born out of hacker culture, the desire to push the chip beyond what it was considered capable of.  Many things born out of "hacker culture" do not have the influence often claimed by proponents.  

Second, SID music was compensation for the Europeans' technological cul-de-sac.  I mean the distribution of games on cassette tapes in Europe long after floppy drives had become prevalent in the US and Japan.  In short, SID music was born because the Europeans could not achieve technical parity with US and Japan.  I'm sorry, but using cassette tapes as the principal software storage distribution medium in 1987 is pathetic.  

Third, the SID wasn't overly used or pushed in the United States.  Many popular games for the Commodore 64 released in the U.S. were ports of games from older computer systems with less advanced sound hardware.   I do note that there were exceptions like Maniac Mansion and Skate or Die.  It was the Adlib and its successors that truly established music, beyond the arcade ditties, in home computers.  The NES did something similar for console games.

[shad0wfax]

I've always been a commodore fan (both C64 and amiga) and a SID fan. Obviously, if you consider the SID chip on today's standards then it is, at best, quite poor, or at worst, simply ridiculous. But let me say a few things at its defence.

First, the SID is an old technology. If I'm not wrong, the C64 came out in 1982. At this time, the SID was simply the most advanced home computer audio chip available, with very interesting features, such as 3 oscillators with 4 different waveforms each (triangle, saw, pulse -with real time variable widht; can act as a square- and random -noise). It also featured independent vairable volume levels for each channel, high-pass, mid-pass and low-pass filters, resonance, ring modulation, limited DAC capabilites (4-bit), and even a line-in which can process an inconming signal. The main engineer of the SID worked also in the design of the Ensoniq Mirage, one of the most famous synths and samplers of the 80's. Plainly speaking, it was far ahead from the pc speaker sound and the AY chips used by MSX's, Amstrads and Sinclairs.

Second, as Great Hierophant points out, there was (is) a culture of "pushing- up-to-its-limits-and-beyond" in the C64 scene. It's something radically different from the nowaday's pc computer culture. If you are constantly getting more powerful hardware (more mhz, more powerful gpu's, etc.), programmers have no incentives to try to get the most from the machine: if it goes slow, throw it more mhz. On the contrary, if you're stuck with some hardware (only 64k, only 16 colors, only 3 sound channels and the like), most programmers will do the most to get the maximum out the machine. C64 programmers have done things that were simply beyond the imagination of the very C64 creators. They have done theoretically impossible things such as showing more than 8 sprites at the same time, show graphics on the screen borders, creating new colors (different from the standard 16), mixing hi-res and lo-res graphics in the same screen, creating interlaced modes, playing digitized music and synthesized music at the same time, etc. They make the people wonder: but can really the C64 do THAT??!! IMHO, C64 and Amiga programmers are among the best and more talented one can find. Regarding SID music, some talented musicians/programmers (Rob Hubbard, Tim Follin, Jeroen Tel of Maniacs of Noise, and others) have pushed the SID to another level, creating "impossible" sounds and making the illusion it has 5 or even 6 voices. Just listen to some of my favourites such as Cybernoid II, Savage or Ghouls'n'Ghosts.

There's a point, though, in which I disagree with Great Hierophant. The reason why most people didn't have a floppy disk unit in Europe was not because technology wasn't available. You could buy the 1541 here back in 1982 if you wanted to. The problem was other: it was very expensive (as much or even a bit more than the C64 itself). On the other hand, the C64 was a very affordable computer, and this was one of the main reasons of its success. So it's normal that many (poor) people had a C64 with a datassete. It was the computer culture for the masses in Europe. The same occurred with the Amstrad, the Sinclair and the MSX; there was only a few people with disk drives.

[Laust]

First, the good SID music is born out of hacker culture, the desire to push the chip beyond what it was considered capable of.  Many things born out of "hacker culture" do not have the influence often claimed by proponents.

Well, I can't say how influential it was, but I remember seeing many things on the C64 that were clever and innovative, before seeing the same on other platforms many years later. From dynamic soundtracks (the music changes seamlessly depending on gameplay) in games like Lazy Jones and Glider Rider to the customizable loading tunes in Delta and Hawkeye (where you could mix and match bass, drum, and melody lines to create a number of varied "tunelets"). And then there's Times of Lore which uses a random number generator to play one of several guitar solos each time the tune loops.

Obviously these were crude ideas and compromised due to time and CPU/memory restraints and can't match eg. iMuse and Roland's Do-Re-Mix (both of which were no doubt thought up independently), but nevertheless I think the same idea is there.

Second, SID music was compensation for the Europeans' technological cul-de-sac.  I mean the distribution of games on cassette tapes in Europe long after floppy drives had become prevalent in the US and Japan.  In short, SID music was born because the Europeans could not achieve technical parity with US and Japan.  I'm sorry, but using cassette tapes as the principal software storage distribution medium in 1987 is pathetic.  

Uh, what? So you're saying that if C64 games had been floppy based there wouldn't have been any SID music? I can't follow the logic in that.  

It's true some games had a loading tune that would play while the game loaded (which would usually take a good 2-4 minutes) but in most cases companies would use the same tune (or variation of tunes) for their loaders or even an old game tune. In other words, very few games had tunes written particular for their loaders, although it did happen (Rambo comes to mind as the most famous example and just two games, Last Ninja 1 and 2 made a point out of having a unique loading tune for each level, adding up to an impressive couple of soundtracks). Arguably loading music was not what pushed SID music forward.

SID music was born because talented people (like Hubbard, who focused on the C64 specifically due to its advanced sound chip) came along and took an interest in the platform and its capabilities. Of course, the huge success of the C64 was a factor as well.

Third, the SID wasn't overly used or pushed in the United States.  Many popular games for the Commodore 64 released in the U.S. were ports of games from older computer systems with less advanced sound hardware.   I do note that there were exceptions like Maniac Mansion and Skate or Die.  It was the Adlib and its successors that truly established music, beyond the arcade ditties, in home computers.  The NES did something similar for console games.

There's definitely a difference between Europe and America here. The C64 remained popular for a good while longer in Europe and arguably the music and graphics excelled (in England in particular). A lot of people here remember it and the music - on the PC side they're more likely to remember PC Speaker music than Adlib (at least in my experience).

[shad0wfax]

SID music was born because talented people (like Hubbard, who focused on the C64 specifically due to its advanced sound chip) came along and took an interest in the platform and its capabilities

I remind having read an interview with Rob Hubbard in which he said that he didn't know which home computer to buy until somebody told him that the C64 had the best sound Then he wrote music for it and became a legend in the C64 scene.

[robertmo]

Has anyone ever seen a picture of Sound Blaster 1.0?