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Re:Canyon.mid by whywhywhywhy on Monday June 16, 2025 @06:18AM (#44288101)
When they say "PC Speaker" they mean that thing that beeps when your computer fails to boot being used to play music, not normal speakers vs dedicated midi device.
Re:Canyon.mid by khedoros1 on Monday June 16, 2025 @03:18PM (#44292586)
Yes. 35 years ago, the family PC-clone didn't have any dedicated audio hardware, just the built-in speaker, and that was pretty common. A couple years later, we got a "Sound Blaster" card (more likely, a clone). That provides a FM synthesis chip (typically used for music), and PCM audio output (for sound effects, voice, video playback) that doesn't require constant load on the CPU (it was possible to output scratchy digital audio on the PC Speaker, but CPU-intensive).

If you've heard music from the Sega Genesis, that's the same Yamaha FM Synthesis technology (details differ, of course).

So, games would often support different audio hardware. Here's a favorite:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IOL4q5tDDQ (Secret of Monkey Island theme, PC Speaker)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qpB-HAZsRs (Secret of Monkey Island theme, Adlib/OPL2/FM synthesis, common option for PC sound hardware)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3dB0qEcG20 (Secret of Monkey Island theme, Roland MT-32/Linear Arithmetic synthesis, premium hardware, likely what the music was originally composed for)

Re:Canyon.mid by whywhywhywhy on Tuesday June 17, 2025 @10:57PM (#44306286)
All sounds wrong to me because I grew up with this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpmpBLANYwM