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From: mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (Doug McDonald)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,rec.games.programmer
Subject: Re: Quality of PC sampled sound
Keywords: samples, sound, IBM-PC, Amiga
Message-ID: <1990Jun28.015758.19188@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 28 Jun 90 01:57:58 GMT
References: <1990Jun7.173911.424@cbnews.att.com> <1207@metaphor.Metaphor.COM> <1990Jun26.013548.246@eng.umd.edu> <1990Jun28.003451.1287@persoft.com>
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Reply-To: mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (Doug McDonald)
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Organization: School of Chemical Sciences, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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In article <1990Jun28.003451.1287@persoft.com> eda@persoft.com (Ed Almasy) writes:
>
>>[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...
IBM PC's aren't SUPPOSED to sound anything other than a very very mundane
beep. All they do for sound is to turn on and off a single bit 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. 
>
This last statement is utterly wrong. There is no real hardware support for
sound on the PC other than a simple timer that makes a square wave.
Square vanes sound bad. IF the PC had a "control everything" OS
like, say, Unix, then there would be nothing anybody could do 
to make the PC sound better. GIven that MSDOS is the way it is,
a very very clever, very smart person, with lots of effort, can 
get it to sound better by, essentially, doing digital-to-analog
conversion by time multiplexing IN SOFTWARE!!! Those who belittle
such efforts are usually not really familiar to what is going on.

A challenge: To the people saying "get a real OS" ----- Unix
runs just fine on 386 PC's. Go out and buy it at the store. Write
a program under Unix to do the same job of displaying sound. On
the same hardware.

I dare you. I double dare you. Especially if more than one process is
running.

Doug McDonald