Also, somebody please feel free to correct me on some facts of the long-winded explanation/history of PC game music I wrote if I've gotten anything wrong. Or if there's some pertinent information I missed.
Okay.
Make Eric Wing proud! Waveblaster sucks!
The Long-Winded Explanation[Don't be afraid to admit the nerdiness, err, technicality of your topic. "Long-Winded" may imply self bias towards your own subject. Not sure if you were trying to be humorous. Then again I may be reading into it too much. Consider revising the title.]Flashback to the early to mid-90s: DOS was still going strong, Windows 95 was brand new, the first-person-shooter was on the rise, 3D graphics looked like
jagged, pixelated and unstable mishapen of blocky objects (yet they still impressed us and blew us away)
. Games like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Descent, Duke Nukem 3D, and Quake were the top-of-the-line best selling high-quality games advertized on store shelves. The technology for digital music in a computer game was still very young.
Multi-gigabyte storage media was a delicacy (if it was available at all). There wasn't much storage space for a lot of high quality game content on floppy disks, hard disks, or CD-ROMs (the DVD-ROM wasn't yet available). In order to conserve disk space for the consumer and to fit as much content as possible into a game, developers generally chose not to use digital audio formats for game soundtracks. In addition to this, the hardware did not yet exist for efficient or adequate playback of high quality digital audio while running a whole game engine with a decent framerate at the same time.
CD Audio
If a game did have digital music it was probably in the form of Redbook audio tracks on the game's CD-ROM disc. [Young people these days don't know what Redbook is. Consider explaining the term or simply saying music played off a CD.]This gave perfect audio clarity to a game's soundtrack but lacked any real control other than "play track", "skip track", and "stop track". There was no looping capability which led to breaking the immersive game experience when a song would suddenly stop playing in the middle of an intense battle
. and the The CD-ROM drive
would have had to be set up correctly along with the user's sound card software/hardware in order for it to be heard at all.
[This sentence works better as an introductory sentence. Consider revising your paragraph or developing it into two.]It also had a tendency to skip if your desk got banged around a little bit. [Try to keep the tone consistent throughout your technical document. Joking in the middle of a technical explanation may seem unnecessary or out of place.]Also, some games were so large that they had to supply two CDs: one with the game data and the other with the game soundtrack. Some people didn't like juggling around so many CDs and it was more expensive for companies to distribute.
[Well the industry as a whole still sells games on CDROMs to this day. They've been slow in adopting DVD disc out of concern people may not be able to install their games. Consider revising?]MOD Format
Another popular form of digital game music at the time was the MOD file format (short for "Module"). MODs were unique in that they had all the wavetable instruments stored in the file along with the musical notation and effect information (like volume/panning changes). This offered the composer a little more freedom and creative control over how the soundtrack would react to what the player was doing at any given time. The best example of this is the game Unreal, where if an enemy noticed you and started to chase and attack you the music would
seamlessly transition into an upbeat battle theme. After the battle was over, the music would again
seamlessly [a synonym would be good here] transition back into the previous
laid-back exploration-like music [Consider revising]. And all with realistic instruments. [Run-on sentence] However, the instruments used inside a MOD file, though being chosen specifically by the composers themselves, were often of low quality for the purpose of (you guessed it) conserving disk space.
In the console video game world, the Super Nintendo utilised a similar form of music format now known as SPC files. [You can do without this sentence.... unless you plan your next paragrah to talk about the SNES I would suggest removing it.]MIDI Files
By far the most versatile and oldest game soundtrack medium was the MIDI file
(or equivalent).
[Consider explaining the acronym like you did previously.] MIDI files were tiny in file size
due to the fact that they don't really contain any audio information at all. (a For example a 2-hour long MIDI file could have a file size of only around 900KB!
) MIDI files only contain the musical notation and effect information which is sent to an outside destination that interprets it and outputs it all into the audible form we know as music. MIDI also had the ability
(depending on the format and game engine) to set loop points
. and It also had the capacity to make real-time dynamic changes to musical information such as: the current instrument being played, the volume/panning/velocity settings of any instrument, and even the ability to alter custom effect information like reverb, chorus, delay, or distortion depending on the hardware in use and if the game soundtrack supported them.
The best example of games that used this technology extensively were the early games made by LucasArts with their custom proprietary music engine called 'iMuse', used mostly with their adventure game engine 'SCUMM' (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion). [Consider revising --- breaking this into a couple of senteces.]FM Synth
The term "FM Synth" is Short shorthand for 'Frequency Modulation Synthesizer'. Rather than relying on expensive external MIDI hardware, consumers could buy relatively cheaper 8-bit ISA cards with FM synth capability. This appealed to the poor man's PC gamer who couldn't afford a $16,000 Roland synthesizer at the expense of the immensely superior audio clarity and quality. Nevertheless, many users even now prefer the sound of an FM synth music card as opposed to the
dassling dazzling digital audio possibilities of today. Nearly every single PC game released for DOS that has a MIDI (or equivalent) soundtrack supports an FM synth card.
[This paragraph needs heavy revising in my opinion. I would avoid the use of popular catch phrases or words. The message implies a heavy bias against FM Synth (even when there is a sentence near the end that means the opposite). It also implies FM Synth was mostly or only used by "poor people". I remember FM Synth was pretty much the norm, the standard hardware found in most computers of the time. Consider keeping an objective tone.]The best cards [The best or the most common or popular?] that used this form of MIDI representation were those of Adlib and Creative Labs' famous Sound Blasters.
[Don't assume your readers know about these brands/companies. Consider revising (explain the facts).]While Adlib perfected FM synth with each new model release of the Adlib card right up to the Adlib Gold (which sported a
dasslingly dazzlingly impressive stereo OPL3 FM chip!), the Sound Blasters evened out the odds with their support for both FM synth MIDI and digital sound effects.
And while While Adlib did
eventually support digital sound on the Adlib Gold, it was sadly too late a move for the company as it wasn't Sound Blaster-compatible.
And the The Sound Blaster being the more popular choice, not as much support was made for the Adilb Gold [ Consider revising ]. Later versions of the AWE32 were made with a different FM synth chip that was compatible with the original Yamaha OPL chip that the above PC cards were based on which sounds slightly different. In the video game console world, the Sega Genesis used the Yamaha YM2612 OPL chip for game soundtracks.
