Music or FX only in games

[Paulie85]

I've asked about this before but it really annoys me when I have to choose between music and fx in certain games. I have also asked some of the people who adjust games for WHDLoad if there is any way they could alter the games so that we could hear both simultaneously. Usually  the response is that this is very difficult change if the game has not been designed around the Amiga's 4 channel sound.


I understand that it may be difficult if the music already uses four channels, though one channel could be cut when the effects are used.

But I was thinking- what about converting the music to raw audio mono which would only take up one channel, leaving three free for the fx. I know this would increase the file size but storage has increased a lot since these games were released and it shouldn't increase them by a huge amount.

I really thought someone would be doing something about this as it really takes away from some games. I would do it myself if I knew how to go about it.

Any thoughts?:confused:

[Dr.Bongo]

Nice idea but, I think it would take a lot of programming to adapt each game to do this. I also think that it may take a high end Amiga to be able to both simultaneously.

[Paulie85]

Does it really take a lot of programming to loop what is basically sample during play? How did the CDTV achieve CD quality audio as well as effects in games with just a 68000? Wouldn't it be a similar to that? I didn't think raw audio was particularly taxing as it isn't compressed like mp3.

[mikrucio]

LOL PAULIE

Its called red book audio.

loop based game music would take up precious chip ram.
this is really a bad idea and goes against the Amiga's positive aspects.

[Paulie85]

LOL PAULIE

Its called red book audio.

loop based game music would take up precious chip ram.
this is really a bad idea and goes against the Amiga's positive aspects.

Care to expand on that answer? Do you know much about red book audio and how it works? Whilst I agree that it is not an ideal solution to have one long sample for the music, I'm not convinced that it wouldn't work. How much chip RAM would it use?

When I play HAM videos using Hamp it runs fine and the sound is one long raw audio track isn't it?

[commodorejohn]

How much chip RAM would it use?

Uncompressed? 28.19 KB/s, mono, at the highest sample rate. Eats up that 512KB pretty dang fast.

[mikrucio]

22050 Hz, 8 bit, mono = 1.25 MB per minute.

Red book audio, is CD AUDIO.

just like your home CD player.

You can use 4 channel paula DMA for great music & sound fx together. you just need to be very careful and very clever.

[Paulie85]

Yes, I know that much-but I don't get what point you are making regarding it.
I know that the four channels can provide great music and sfx together. As I stated in my first post, I know there are various tricks that can be employed to do this( e.g. cutting out one of the music channels when an effect is being played) and inquired about applying it to the games.
The problem seems to be that the music and effects should really be designed with this in mind and that it is difficult to change later.
I just want a quick and dirty solution to improve the gaming experience a bit.

[mikrucio]

sorry paulie.

your question is like asking George Lucas to go back to Star wars 4 and redo all the
space combat scenes in CGI instead of miniatures.

[ChaosLord]

But I was thinking- what about converting the music to raw audio mono which would only take up one channel, leaving three free for the fx. I know this would increase the file size but storage has increased a lot since these games were released and it shouldn't increase them by a huge amount.

Its a perfectly valid idea.  I thought about it but never did it in my own games because ppl like stereo.  So I was going to have an option to allow stereo music (which is really 4-channel to 64-channel musix that has been premixed down to 2 channels) to spool from the HD in real-time.  But that only gives me 2 channels left over to do soundfx.

Anywayz I never quite got round to implementing my idea because:
1) I hafta go thru and reprogram many thousands of lines of code to work corectly with this new option.  Its an ez 20 hours of work.  Possibly more.  And I have at least 400,000 hours of work on other things that I need to do.

2) It burns huge amounts of HD space.  Now you know that HD space is basically free these days.  And I know that too.  But there are a lot of weird Amiga users out there who think that hd space is "limited" or "costs lots of money" or they think "downloading a 2GB file from Aminet costs $300.00" or other wacko beliefs.  So it just isn't worth it for me to do jack and then listen to 245 ppl complain about how "huge" my itty bitty game is to download.

Now u understand why nobody did ur idea.

[ChaosLord]

If u were asking "why don't ppl haxx their way into old gamez and recode them to use spooling music" then the answer is "because it is a lot of work and the ppl who know how to do it don't care to spend huge amounts of time on old games that they don't care about all that much."

[Bamiga2002]

C'mon now, what would eg. Xenon 2 Megablast music be if the shooting fx didn't interrupt the in-game music . Or Super Cars where you tried to avoid skidding (or was it bumping into other cars?) to hear the in-game music properly! It's part of the fun and in "Amiga spirit" :razz:

[AJCopland]

Perhaps a better way of putting it is that the CDTV/CD32 audio didn't have to go through the chipset it was just mixed into the audio output separately. That's why it could stream music whilst the games played sound FX.

Separating out the sound fx and music from existing games would be tricky simply because identifying where that data is on disk and/or in memory would itself be difficult.

Then of course the games themselves were written to be doing one, the other, or both and all of that would need to be rewritten for each game. Only we don't have the source code or original authors so it can be a big challenge to do.

This is all ignoring the cases where, as Bamiga2002 says the game actively manages the audio and switches things in or out, perhaps even changing the music tracks in response to things that are happening in game.

Newly written games might be able to do it however.

It's not a bad idea overall, but the implementation of it is probably not worth it for old titles.

[paul1981]

I've asked about this before but it really annoys me when I have to choose between music and fx in certain games. I have also asked some of the people who adjust games for WHDLoad if there is any way they could alter the games so that we could hear both simultaneously. Usually  the response is that this is very difficult change if the game has not been designed around the Amiga's 4 channel sound.


I understand that it may be difficult if the music already uses four channels, though one channel could be cut when the effects are used.

But I was thinking- what about converting the music to raw audio mono which would only take up one channel, leaving three free for the fx. I know this would increase the file size but storage has increased a lot since these games were released and it shouldn't increase them by a huge amount.

I really thought someone would be doing something about this as it really takes away from some games. I would do it myself if I knew how to go about it.

Any thoughts?:confused:

New games which are system friendly should support AHI for >4 channel sound, but many folks don't really have a problem with 4 channel sound so they don't implement it. Personally, I know where you're coming from because there's one game that annoys me when the music cuts out...and that game is Lotus 1! Damn those stupid skid sounds that ruins the rockin' music!

There's a patch for Alienbreed 3D though which enables 8 channel sound, so some people obviously do care. May I ask which games are causing you grief?

[kickstart]

Turrican 2 uses 8 channel for music and fx... and turrican is on the top of in game music charts.