Xref: utzoo comp.sys.ibm.pc:53306 rec.games.programmer:1988
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!uwvax!persoft!eda
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: <1990Jun28.164522.2987@persoft.com>
Date: 28 Jun 90 16:45:22 GMT
References: <1990Jun26.013548.246@eng.umd.edu> <1990Jun28.003451.1287@persoft.com> <1990Jun28.015758.19188@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Distribution: na
Organization: Persoft, Inc.
Lines: 50

In article <1990Jun28.015758.19188@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (Doug McDonald) writes:
>In article <1990Jun28.003451.1287@persoft.com> eda@persoft.com (Ed Almasy) writes:
>>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.

If you would have read the rest of my message, instead of just having a
"my OS is better than your OS" knee-jerk reaction, you would have
noticed that I wasn't talking about the sound capabilities of the
machine - I was talking about how the fact that most PC software goes
straight to the hardware instead of going through the operating system,
which causes all sorts of grief when two or more software components
want to twiddle the same piece of hardware at the same time.  The
program originally under discussion is a prime example of such a
component, since it does things like reprogramming the timer chip and
disabling all sorts of interrupts. 

>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.

If the PC had a "control everything" OS, then a program like the one in
question could tell the operating system that it needed exclusive access
to the resources, the operating system could tell the other apps/drivers
to shut down for a moment, and we could have quality sound without
crashing the whole machine.  As it is there is very little arbitration,
and programs are constantly stepping all over each other when they try
to optimize performance.

>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.  

What exactly is "digital-to-analog conversion by time multiplexing"?? I
don't know if you know anything about the program under discussion (you
don't seem to), but there are no analog operations involved.  It clicks
the speaker at a rate determined by the data that you feed it - purely a
digital operation.  There is no support for analog sound in the PC.

And finally .  .  .  .  .  I did not say anything to belittle the piece
of software in question.  (Once again,) if you would have read the rest
of my message you would have realized that I was merely commenting on
(and complaining about) the fact that getting various high performance
software components to work together under MS-DOS is a real headache.