- i.e. Paula audio for that distinctive sound, and trackers. Otherwise, what's the point?
Could anyone comment on this ? What makes the Paula audio distinctive ?
Surely its only as good as the sampling hardware and techniques used to capture the sounds?
The limitations of Paula (number of channels, max sampling rat, bitrate etc) can be done with any modern tracker or DAW .
I get the "SID" chip thing being analog in nature its hard to get emulation right - but paula's audio is basically all digital.
I composed music on the Amiga for years , mostly using soundstudio - using the stock hardware and a midi interface. I got some great sounds out of the machine and knew a fair few techniques for getting the best sound quality. (perhaps someone recognises my nick (polyp) )
But I never once thought the Amiga had a "unique or distinctive sound" (other than the limitations of 8bit samples) - I always thought the sound hardware could have been better - i wanted a successor to SID.
N
I've been saying that for years, Paula is just a simple 4 DAC IC and output through a pretty noisy bus to be quite honest. When people say they attribute the sound of some tune to an Amiga what they really mean is all those sh1t samples that everyone kept using even when they were totally inappropriate. Games companies were the worst at this to be honest, mega demos rarely used those rubbish mid 80s synth samples past, well the mid 80s to be exact. Even the filter is horrible.
And yet in 1985 on the Amiga (AKA Amiga 1000) to have effectively no sound chip and just replace it with a completely flexible 4 channel 8 bit DAC replace it with basic AM/FM control of playback was pure and utter genius. The only thing wrong with every other Amiga after the 1000 is Commodore never did the very simple trick of making 6 or 8 channel (or dual Paula) motherboards to give you enough for a game. 4 channels was fine in 1985-87 but by 1989/90 we should have had at least a simple dual Paula implementation IMO.
OR the short story....don't shoot Jay Miner and co for putting one in the Amiga (AKA A1000)...... shoot the talentless musicians and mostly the penny pinching software houses that wouldn't stretch to a purchasing sampler and renting some high quality synths from Korg et al to make new exciting 100% appropriate samples for their game soundtrack tunes.
