earworm, old PC game soundtracks, thought
Giving "At Doom's Gate", the background music for E1M1 in the original Doom, a little listen with various soundfonts we have on our computer.
...I think it actually sounds better using the lower-fidelity soundfonts - ones closer to what contemporary computers would likely have used.
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re: earworm, old PC game soundtracks, thought
I mean, to be fair, it's /always/ an absolute banger
just ... yeah, I think it's a little better with the kind of sound compromises that small soundfonts use
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re: earworm, old PC game soundtracks, thought
@packbat A large part of why I'm such a retrogaming enthusiast isn't the gaming itself but the music. Each unique system (well, each unique set of sound hardware) was like a new instrument with its own exploration of texture.
Since the PC had many major types of sound hardware, those textures could vary so much not just from game to game but even within the same game played on different hardware or with different settings. At one point I had both a Sound Blaster 16 Pro and a Gravis UltraSound PNP; true joy was had in listening to a game's MIDI soundtrack over and over, OPL2 and OPL3 old GUS soundbank and InterWave soundbank and sometimes a couple different software synths, to hear what came through best in each.
In modern times, I use plugins for foobar2000 that let me emulate playback on nearly any FM synth chip or patchset at a whim... and often, the originally targeted hardware is still the one that sounds right because of those tasty tasty textures. Yay, DOOM on a grungy OPL2!
