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jasongilltoday at 12:24 AM3 repliesview on HN

This is a cool technical feat, but I am almost sure that id attempted this and realized that it just was not ever going to sound very good. The PC speaker sound effects are bad enough (which is to say "as good as they can be, but still bad") and sound "cheap", and adding beep-speaker music on top of that would just result in a noisy mess - as evidenced by the video.

The beep-speaker music in Commander Keen was good and fit the theme of the game - but to keep the environment of Doom and the dark and moody feel and not be limited to the dulcet tones of a tiny piezo buzzer was a design decision, not being lazy.

Note that they could have supported Disney Sound Source / Covax Speech Thing style audio (they did in Wolf3D and Keen) but skipped that as well, likely for the same reason - it would have sounded like murky hollow garbage.

You can email John Romero and ask him, he responds to emails - my guess is that he will say "yeah we considered it, it sounded bad, we abandoned the idea" not that they were lazy. If you read about the run up to Doom's release, and the amount of crunch time they were putting in, they were anything but lazy!


Replies

minki_the_avalitoday at 12:51 AM

Honestly, the design aspect really wasn't something I had considered, It definitively does make a lot of sense. Still sad though that it didn't officially happen. So far, all the arguments I had seen against it where purely about the performance, which in my testing isn't really a big factor for this.

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justsomehnguytoday at 3:58 AM

> The PC speaker sound effects are bad enough (which is to say "as good as they can be, but still bad") and sound "cheap"

They are lifted as is from Shadow Knights.

> which is to say "as good as they can be, but still bad"

They could be done better or even way better, it's just that wasn't an important target in any way. Especially considering the performance target of 486DX+ whicih wasn't not a cheap machine in any way in 1993.

https://www.mobygames.com/game/1952/shadow-knights/

AnotherGoodNametoday at 3:14 AM

Honestly everyone that’s actually heard pc speaker audio done well is shocked at the unexpectedly high quality of it. Star Control 2 being a shining example. Don’t judge it by the poor examples, judge pc audio by the great ones. Its surprisingly good.