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From: eda@persoft.com (Ed Almasy)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,rec.games.programmer
Subject: Re: Quality of PC sampled sound
Keywords: samples, sound, IBM-PC, Amiga
Message-ID: <1990Jun28.003451.1287@persoft.com>
Date: 28 Jun 90 00:34:51 GMT
References: <1990Jun7.173911.424@cbnews.att.com> <1207@metaphor.Metaphor.COM> <1990Jun26.013548.246@eng.umd.edu>
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Organization: Persoft, Inc.
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In article <1990Jun26.013548.246@eng.umd.edu> nulspace@eng.umd.edu (Michael Chang) writes:
>There exists a program written by a Canadian author, what it does is play
>digitized sounds in the Macintosh format.  Surprisingly enough, it is
>*damn* good, the quality that is.

The problem with this program is that it grabs almost EVERYTHING in
the machine to accomplish its task.  In other words, it makes the
(usually foolish) assumption that it can do whatever it damn well
pleases with the hardware, and if you've got something else running in
the machine (like multitasking shells, network shells, device drivers,
TSRs, et cetera) you're screwed - the machine will act weird, lock up,
or even reboot in the middle of the sound playback. 

>[I don't know why IBM-PC sounds are so crappy, the sound quality seems 
>mighty fine to me after listening to these mac files... maybe a 
>conspiracy by IBM to hobble it and then ten years later come up with 
>a new invention that does wonders to the speaker?]

There's no conspiracy, just a lack of coordination of development
efforts on how to deal with the hardware.  If the PC had a operating
system that was powerful enough that most developers would go through it
(instead of going directly to the iron), doing "mac-like" sound wouldn't
be a problem. 

I don't mean to cut down the program you mentioned, but after spending
several hours tracing through it to find out exactly why it wouldn't run
with anything else in the machine, I felt compelled to respond. :-)