I meant samples/sampling in this way. 
Do you have an example? At the moment I remember only games that used the (FM) synthesizer for music and not samplesā¦ 
Thatās one way to use samples, but the term is not limited to musical use. Any waveform taken from somewhere qualifies as a sample.
Indeed, most DOS games used a software mixer for sfx only, but there are some games which do music that way nevertheless. Crusader: No Remorse (DOS original), Pinball Fantasies (straight port from AGA Amiga), or Turrican II (also ported from Amiga, but with the graphics redone) comes to mind.
In Turrican II, even on the Amiga, the title music uses a software mixer, as it plays more than 4 channels.
Pinball Fantasies can even play the music on PC speaker, which sounded surprisingly good for no soundcard at all, as long as you had a real speaker like the original IBM PC and not some cheap piezo knockoff that is.
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Yep, I know, technically thatās right. But the term āsamplesā/āsamplingā in music is mostly used in that way (today).
Oh, yeah! I remember those, Thanks!
Interesting, I didnāt know that. My first sound card on PC was a Soundblaster Pro clone and I made music on it using Fast Tracker 2, in the same way you would on Amiga. It easily handled more channels than 4. I was always wondering why most games on PC at that time had horrible midi music when you could do stuff like that. Even C-64 sounded better than general midi or Adlib (obviously I didnāt know what MT-32 was at that time).
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Thatās the software mixer at work. Soundblaster Pro also has a much lower sample rate in stereo than the Amiga. They improved the DAC quite a bit on the SB16.
A software mixer requires quite some CPU time while OPL2 takes almost nothing. That way, more CPU time was left for the rest of the game engine.
Itās not that simple. Depends much on the skill of the coder as well to what you want to achieve. Also General MIDI is just a data format, for which the quality also depends quite a lot on the sound hardware and the wavetable in use. There are General MIDI drivers for Adlib, which usually do infact sound quite horrible. The SID chip has the advantage of fully programmable filters which Adlib doesnāt have.
A well composed General MIDI file sound quite good on a Roland SoundCanvas, which is why those are used by most game music composers at the time and also the best device for most games in the mid 90ās.
Btw, the C64 can play 8 bit samples on the SID too, which can even be filtered. Such technics were only done in demos, since they take quite a lot of the little 64K RAM, and also quite some CPU time, so thereās barely anything left for a game engine. My favorite demo for showing of SID abilities:
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I admit I know Adlib only from emulation on SB cards and yeah I know, midi is just notes not a particular sound but still, that thin sterile sound was all that I could get from my powerful Pentium 60 machine at the time which was very disappointing after having C-64 and Amiga before. But as you mentioned, some (very few) games were able to get that Amiga-like sound.
To this day I prefer gritty sound of Amiga and C-64 to MT-32 and Sound Canvas for some if not most of the music. Games that use orchestral music really benefit from good midi but when it comes to electronica and more modern stuff itās not that great. It reminds me of Casio keyboards and elevator music. The demo you posted for C-64 still sounds pretty cool and I just checked LGR video for Sound Canvas and it just cheesy to me for the most part. MI sounds great on MT-32 though.
BTW did you manage to complete Indy 4 on Amiga? Some of the Atlantis was just as bad as Algieria in my opinion.
Adlib has a Yamaha OPL2 chip. There were quite a few soundcards including the SB Pro, which had one of the Yamaha OPL family chip on it. Those are in fact 100% Adlib compatible without any emulation. It wasnāt until much later when soundcards became more powerful that they ditched the Yamaha chip and did it in emulation instead.
Yamaha OPL chips were in use all over the place for quite a while. It can also be found in arcades, pinball machines and some other devices with low end MIDI capabilities.
Most peculiar, even the C64 couldnāt escape it entirely, as there was in fact a soundcard for it too:
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And there are MIDI interfaces, so you could control external synthesizers.
btw: Are there any C64 games or demos that use a MIDI interface for (in-game) music?
Commodore had some really good engineers throughout its history. both the C64 and the Amiga were impressive products for their timeā¦ especially the Amiga. Just speaks volumes just how good the technology in it was when it could still hold its own in the early 90s with tech that was introduced in 1985.
Granted, when VGA games started coming out Amiga was left behind in colors on screen etc and the 386 definitely had a lot more horsepower than the good old 68000, but even then everything with sprites and scrolling i.e 2D action games generally performed better on Amiga thanks to the custom chips etcā¦ and obviously AGA Amigas matched VGA when it came to colors on screen but it was too little too late.
Commodore just rested on its laurels on for too long, and having read a lot about the company the imcompetence of its leadership was just baffling.
But I also think the relative complexity of the Amiga hardware also made it harder to update especially If you wanted to maintain compatibity. Seems like the modular, easy to upgrade, off the shelf parts design of the IBM PC was a pretty wise decision in retrospect.
Anyway, I first played Monkey Island on the Amiga and its still probably my favorite version of the first game overall despite having a soft sport for the art in the EGA version, the soundtrack was gorgeous on the Amiga, Monkey 2 was certainly better on the PC in every way.
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