Quote:
Originally Posted by Shatterhand
I've been thinking about this for a while now.
While I do *love* Amiga games, grown up with them and everything, it really annoys me how many games you have to choose between Sound FX or Music. It's really weird when I came from MSX, a much inferior machine, and basically every game had Music AND SFX, and I am pretty sure that's how it worked on the C64 too.
This really kills the mood of many games.
I've always wondered why coders did this on Amiga games, and I believe mostly would be for the following reasons:
A) Memory constraints. Since music actually may get a fair amount of memory on Amiga (unlike it was on 8 bit systems), the coders would make you choose to either load the music or load the sfx, but both couldn't fit on memory.
B) Use of the sound channels. I guess many musicians didn't bother making music using fewer channels, or maybe even coding the game properly to use just 1 or 2 channels, and leave ther other 2 for music.
Now I see WHDLoad has lots of good patches on games that fixes and add stuff on games (2 button support is really *AWESOME*). I wonder, would it be possible to patch games to add a support to have both music and sfx at the same time?
I don't think Memory Constraints would be a problem anymore, since I guess most people using WHDLoad would have a fair amount of Ram anyway.
And for the use of music channels... I guess that would be the biggest problem, but many games have SFX that "silences" one of the music channels when the SFX plays. While this is also annoying, it's still better to have no music or no sfx at all. I really wouldn't care... I guess games that make you choose between Music or SFX would use all 4 channels for SFX and this could get really messy, with different music channels being silenced for different sound effects... but I still think it would be worth a shot.
Deluxe Galaga did this very smartly, by letting the player choose what channels would be used for music and which ones for sfx... you could still have a very cool soundtrack playing (Even if lacking one or two instruments) while having proper sfx within the game.
So, is any of this doable? There are lots of games that could benefit from it !
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fact is most amiga games features music+sfx
the games which you can chose music or sfx are a minority /were done by lame coders which were so lazy could not solve the 4 channels limitation
examples:
zool 1 and 2
lollypop
wonderdog
gods
for these: play the PC or the console version: