Why did the Atari ST designers use such a CRAPPY sound chip?

[chip]

I agree, too much technical details .... so boring

I must say, people should enjoy much more what they have

Too much "i don't like this, i don't like this too" IMHO

Have fun people, it's just music in the end !

[roondar]

The interesting thing is of course that an awful lot of music today is being done by synthesizers, even if you wouldn't know it. Anything from individual instruments down to full orchestra's can be done by high quality synthesis these days and many people can't even hear the difference any more.

As for these old systems: I don't think you can say "synthesis is too sterile" or "8 bit pcm is too noisy". These systems all have their own 'sound' and some of the music done on every single one of them is quite good. I have a real soft spot for the SID (an example here is that I still find the in-game tune of Golden Axe on the C64 to be pretty much the best version out there, same with the in-game tunes for the C64 version of R-Type). I've learned to like the Sega MD sound as well, there's some great tunes on it. Same with PC-Engine.

Adlib slightly less so, but that is more exposure than anything else. The Dune soundtrack on Adlib sounds pretty darned good, apart from the drums which admittedly don't sound great. Same with some of the Atari ST songs, there's some pretty good examples in this thread of stuff that is quite catchy. Good music is good music irrespective of the sound chip used.

[Foebane]

Two of the musicdisks I have in my demo collection have chiptunes, which would be right at home with the FM enthusiasts, I would think.

Unless you think Abyss' Preschools are not chiptunes?

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(My favourite in PS#2 is "On and On")

I've heard people say that SID and FM stuff can't be reproduced faithfully on Paula, but this makes me think otherwise. The funny thing is, I like chiptunes on Paula, but not anywhere else. It's like I know the Amiga is capable of any natural or commercial sound reproduction (even if mostly in 8-bit) but other sound hardware is just as capably represented.

[no9]

Originally Posted by roondar

The Dune soundtrack on Adlib sounds pretty darned good, apart from the drums which admittedly don't sound great. Same with some of the Atari ST songs, there's some pretty good examples in this thread of stuff that is quite catchy. Good music is good music irrespective of the sound chip used.

Not sure if there was a debate if an immortal piece of music art can be created for PC Speaker. I wasn't going into this at all. But while we can agree that both versions of Dune OSTs are good there still remains the question - would you replace the soundtrack in Amiga version of the game for Adlib one?

For me the answer is obvious.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by no9

Not sure if there was a debate if an immortal piece of music art can be created for PC Speaker. I wasn't going into this at all. But while we can agree that both versions of Dune OSTs are good there still remains the question - would you replace the soundtrack in Amiga version of the game for Adlib one?

For me the answer is obvious.

I know you're not asking me, but: (up?)grading from Amiga to PC, most of us didn't have any choice.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Foebane

So what happened with the choice of sound chip? Did the engineers not have time to design a 16-bit version of the SID, if that was their plan?

Or did they have the MIDI interface in mind from the start? They ran out of time, said "sod the sound chip, let's just shove in an off-the-shelf cheap piece of tat" and end up with what we got, a 16-bit computer that had an 8-bit sound chip but a MIDI interface to make up for it?

lol - name few reasonable priced sound chips that can be used in ST (not direct competition sourced)...

FYI Atari could use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_AMY and http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers...AMY/index.html - very interesting idea (inverse FFT aka additive synthesis), better than SID for sure but ST was designed from components available on market and in very limited time constrains, only custom IC's used in ST are glue logic chips with relatively low electrical complexity (similar to Gary i.e. gate array).

And MIDI is nothing fancy - MIDI is an UART driven with fixed 31250 bps and UART MC6850 was available on shelf directly (cheapest UART supporting speeds over 19200 bps).

As engineer my component selection will be similar to ST designers - cheap, good ratio between price and functionality (performance).

[no9]

Originally Posted by Foebane

I know you're not asking me, but: (up?)grading from Amiga to PC, most of us didn't have any choice.

I can speak only for myself. I actually had a choice, deciding which route follow when entering 16-bit computers era. Dune game and it's soundtrack was one of the factors my decision. All that narrowly-specialized silicon pieces was dead to me even if they could reproduce the cleanest and most faithful sound of a bassoon.

I was looking exactly for this dirty, overloud, out of tune rave-punk-shit
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...and the rest of Amiga sound versatility, but definitely not for clean, polite FM/SID/AY/YM bleeps and blops .

[drHirudo]

Originally Posted by no9

Not sure if there was a debate if an immortal piece of music art can be created for PC Speaker. I wasn't going into this at all. But while we can agree that both versions of Dune OSTs are good there still remains the question - would you replace the soundtrack in Amiga version of the game for Adlib one?

For me the answer is obvious.

Back in 1996 my Uni had some PC machines with Pentium at 300 MHz CPUs. They didn't have soundcards installed, but I was able to run some tracker software (FastTracker?) that was replaying on the speaker pretty well, by utilizing the high speed. PC enthusiasts from the era used to tell me that once the PC processors get fast enough, they will be able to get Amiga quality sound from the PC speaker. But then the Amiga upgraded with DeliTracker and EaglePlayer to 14-bit.

Regarding the Atari - the extra 0.86 MHz speed compared to the Amiga were rarely used to achieve prettier sound, except for some demos.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by drHirudo

PC enthusiasts from the era used to tell me that once the PC processors get fast enough, they will be able to get Amiga quality sound from the PC speaker.

Last I heard, the PC speaker didn't have volume control, and that is ESSENTIAL for playing back samples!

[Minuous]

Wrong, you can certainly play back sampled sounds on the IBM PC speaker; eg. the MS-DOS port of World Class Leaderboard plays sampled speech.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by no9

Not sure if there was a debate if an immortal piece of music art can be created for PC Speaker. I wasn't going into this at all.

My post was just me pointing out that in my opinion you can't really say 'synth sucks' or 'Paula sucks'. Both have good and bad things going for them. That is all, it wasn't a reply to your post as such

But while we can agree that both versions of Dune OSTs are good there still remains the question - would you replace the soundtrack in Amiga version of the game for Adlib one?

I wouldn't, no. But then, I'm not arguing for either Paula or FM being superior to the other.

Originally Posted by no9

...and the rest of Amiga sound versatility, but definitely not for clean, polite FM/SID/AY/YM bleeps and blops .

SID is many things, but it's not polite. Or particularly clean in most of it's better known tracks. But that doesn't take away that we all have our preferences. For me? There's several Amiga soundtracks I'd replace with their SID counterparts in a heartbeat. And vice versa, for that matter

Back to listening to the Dune soundtrack now!

[robinsonb5]

Originally Posted by Foebane

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!

Last I heard, the PC speaker didn't have volume control, and that is ESSENTIAL for playing back samples!

If you can drive it fast enough you can fake it with pulse width modulation or even sigma-delta modulation. If you can drive it fast enough you can indeed achieve very high quality that way - but good luck doing anything else at the same time!

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Minuous

Wrong, you can certainly play back sampled sounds on the IBM PC speaker; eg. the MS-DOS port of World Class Leaderboard plays sampled speech.

Originally Posted by robinsonb5

If you can drive it fast enough you can fake it with pulse width modulation or even sigma-delta modulation. If you can drive it fast enough you can indeed achieve very high quality that way - but good luck doing anything else at the same time!

I do remember now, in my first year or two of PC ownership, coming across a program that played samples on the PC speaker. Music, if I recall correctly. It was incredibly scratchy and barely intelligible, but it was NOT beeps and boops.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Foebane

I do remember now, in my first year or two of PC ownership, coming across a program that played samples on the PC speaker. Music, if I recall correctly. It was incredibly scratchy and barely intelligible, but it was NOT beeps and boops.

Fundamentally this is same principle as in SACD (considered by some audiophiles superior to CD) - coded signal with speed around 1.1MHz can provide analog signal with over 70..80dB (for example 4th order DeltaSigma with 3 bit PWM) - in PC speaker is driven by i8253 and one PIO's of the i8255 - in theory you can do such quality only in software but probably you need to spent lot of CPU cycles on it...same approach as in C64 or AtariX?/ST.

[amiman99]

Originally Posted by drHirudo

This song is possible to replay by Apple II with Phasor sound card (2 AY-Chips)

We shall expect much more from 8MHz true 16-bit machine like the ST.

Which makes me wonder if the Atari ST ever had sound card additions -
Something like Tocatta, the 12-bit Sunrise DD512 or similar. Not that the Amiga sound cards ever got popular.

First song is pretty good.

[robinsonb5]

Originally Posted by amiman99

First song is pretty good.

It's very good - suspiciously so! It also starts playing before the "loading" and "decrunching" text has displayed, so something's screwy there. I think the actual music has been replaced for some reason - (maybe a copyright strike, though you'd expect the Madonna cover to trigger that if anything does!)


Here's another video of the same production with (some of) the actual first track: [ Show youtube player ]

[amiman99]

Originally Posted by robinsonb5

It's very good - suspiciously so! It also starts playing before the "loading" and "decrunching" text has displayed, so something's screwy there. I think the actual music has been replaced for some reason - (maybe a copyright strike, though you'd expect the Madonna cover to trigger that if anything does!)


Here's another video of the same production with (some of) the actual first track: [ Show youtube player ]

I did not pay attention to that, it does sound better then the one you linked to.
Cheaters!

[drHirudo]

Originally Posted by amiman99

I did not pay attention to that, it does sound better then the one you linked to.
Cheaters!

I've linked the video with timestamp to the second song. The first song is irrelevant.
Yes, robinsonb5 is correct. I have received a copyright claim on the first song:

Dear hirudov2d,

Your video "Apple II - Pure Noise (2016) by French Touch", may have content that is owned or licensed by LatinAutor, UBEM, LatinAutor - UMPG, UMPG Publishing, and UMPI, but it’s still available on YouTube! In some cases, ads may appear next to it.

Usually, I fight and clear all the bogus copyright claims on my videos. But in the case here, there were 5 claimants (LatinAutor, UBEM, LatinAutor - UMPG, UMPG Publishing, and UMPI), and they were actually correct about the claim, so I had to replace the song.

All these copyright claims are also one of the reasons I've stopped recording cool retro chip songs and scene productions - too many claims - mostly bogus, but sometimes not bogus.

There are cases where I receive claims on Apple II speaker sounds - 1 bit DAC controlled by 1 MHz 6502 CPU. While the sound is even worse than PC speaker, the automatic claims software loves to match it with random songs.

[robinsonb5]

Originally Posted by drHirudo

I've linked the video with timestamp to the second song. The first song is irrelevant.
Yes, robinsonb5 is correct. I have received a copyright claim on the first song:

Ah, that explains it - thanks.
(The inline player removes timestamps, unfortunately - so the video plays from the beginning.)

All these copyright claims are also one of the reasons I've stopped recording cool retro chip songs and scene productions - too many claims - mostly bogus, but sometimes not bogus.

Yeah it's very dispiriting. I once recorded myself playing and singing a Weird Al Yankovic parody song and stuck it on YouTube unlisted just to send to a couple of friends - and it was claimed almost immediately!



Between that and the mid-rolls cutting people off mid-sentence I'm finding I use youtube a lot less than I used to.


Anyhow, getting vaguely back on topic, yes the dual-AY songs are quite impressive - and the 8 SID chips example is also really cool. Makes me wonder how many different sound chip recreations could be crowded onto an FPGA and made accessible over MIDI...

[drHirudo]

Regarding the MIDI and why it become more standard on the Atari, than on the Amiga: There is a very good article by the author of Music-X, which explains one fundamental issue why the Amiga was never considered as serious MIDI machine:

Several years later at an Amiga developers conference, I was approached by Bryce Nesbitt, an engineer working on the next version of AmigaOS for Commodore.
I don’t remember his exact words, but the gist of it was that he had finally solved the problem of why Music-X (and other Amiga music software) seemed to have a problem recording Midi data.
Because I went to all of the Amiga expos and developer cons, I knew all of the guys who worked on AmigaOS. I had long email threads where I had pleaded with them for help on solving this bug. One of the engineers (who was eventually fired by Commodore) cynically told me at one CES, “Your problem is simple. The Amiga can’t do Midi.”
And unfortunately, the market of professional musicians seemed to agree — more and more they were gravitating towards the Macintosh as the defacto platform for doing music and Midi, leaving products like mine and Todor Fay’s Bars and Pipes behind.
But Bryce, bless his heart, continued to poke at this problem behind the scenes and eventually came up with an answer. It turned out that the Amiga’s four timer chips were interfering with the serial port. Both the timer chips and the serial hardware were interrupt-driven, and the timer interrupts were a higher priority than the serial interrupts. Worse, the Amiga’s serial chip only had a 1-byte buffer — which means that if you didn’t pick up the data before the next byte arrived, the data would be lost.
Bryce was able to mitigate the problem somewhat by having AmigaOS turn off timer chips that weren’t in use. Unfortunately, they couldn’t all be turned off — AmigaOS needed one timer, and Music-X needed another. Turning off two of the four timers greatly reduced the frequency of the bug, but didn’t eliminate it entirely. And by this point the reputation of the Amiga had been stained beyond redemption, at least in professional music circles. It was too late.

Quote taken from: https://dreamertalin.medium.com/music-x-b4abc68d6f78

So, the Atari ST even with crappier sound chip and not multitasking Operating System, turned out to be better for MIDI than the multimedia machine Amiga.