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In the meantime, the CD was doing something remarkable. It wasn’t always a perfect conversion, but more than enough to facilitate easy composition for the game and its mods.Įventually MIDI style music and its derivatives would be replaced by the audio formats we know today, but bandwidth, processing power and storage capacity would hold that back for a while yet. The music was no exception and as MUS was so similar to MIDI it was trivial to convert from one to the other. This was purely a compatibility concern – many older soundcards has FM sound chips with only 9 FM channels so that was the level the developers targeted.īy keeping as close to recognised standards as possible for game assets Doom was one of the first games to spawn a broad and fanatical modding community, with efforts ranging from texture packs, new levels, new weapons, new sound packs and even total conversions. MUS files were limited to 64KB in size and used only 9 MIDI channels – 8 for melody instruments and the 9th for drums. The game shipped on four floppy disks and keeping things small and manageable was critical. It was designed by John Carmack to be more compact than MIDI, a necessity given how asset-rich Doom was for the time. It uses the same instruments, similar commands and the same principle: a list of sound events.

The music in Doom is essentially a clone of the MIDI standard. The game surely needs no introduction or analysis, but the music and the technology driving it are worthy of note.
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The seminal masterpiece of id Software which catapulted John Carmack and John Carmack to the status of computer game legends was released in 1993, just in time to make my new sound card cackle in glee. Everything changed, and the feeling you got as a child or a young adult (presumably as an older adult too) when you first loaded a game on the new hardware is indescribable. The jump from a 386-66 to a 486-100 was simply incomparable.

A better video card might mean using 8X anti-aliasing instead of 6X, or getting slightly better shadows. Of course these things still happen but the impact just isn’t as great.
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Someone who missed out on the early days of DIY PC upgrades simply won’t understand the joy that came from putting in a new CPU or upgrading the RAM.
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That single upgrade did more to change my gaming experience than anything else I’d done before or since. As if anyone owns an actual CD-ROM instead of DVD or Blu-ray drive… Today, of course, CD-ROM drives topped out at 72x and can write at 56x. A 2x drive, basically, though at the time it was impressive enough to warrant a name all of its own. The sound card arrived at the same time as my first CD-ROM drive which had the very latest “multispin” technology – meaning “twice as fast”.

I put quotes around compatible because actually getting audio to work in many cases was a dark art involving blood sacrifice and forbidden rites. My first graphics card was an Aztech model, “compatible” with AdLib and Creative cards. Last time we saw how MIDI revolutionised game soundtracks and kick-started an era of technical advances and artistic expression that would set video game music on the path towards the fidelity and cinematic immersion we take for granted today.Ĭreative and AdLib were the big players in mainstream sound card – AdLib went bankrupt in 1994 while Creative are still releasing audio hardware today.
