Have you ever tried playing MIDI through the Microsoft Synthesiser? Direct Music allows you to do that pretty easily and MIDIs sound great!

Don''t underestimate the MIDI format; what sucks is the default instrument set. With high-quality samples, MIDI can sound almost like an MP3. And I''m serious.

quote:Original post by RuneLancer
Have you ever tried playing MIDI through the Microsoft Synthesiser? Direct Music allows you to do that pretty easily and MIDIs sound great!

Don''t underestimate the MIDI format; what sucks is the default instrument set. With high-quality samples, MIDI can sound almost like an MP3. And I''m serious.

Quoted because it''s true. If you are coding for windows, the DirectMusic formats are an awesome way to go and DirectMusic directly supports the loading of custom DLS instrument banks (the instruments internally also support any form of ACM compression including mp3, gsm, etc), which is more powerful than mods. What I usually do is get sf2''s and convert them to DLS format and use them with DirectMusic formats. Another benefit of the formats are that they directly support audio scripting for a quick way to develop interactive music, and they even have support for providing chord maps, song variability, and realtime composition of transitions. It''s all really great. DirectMusic Producer (the sequencer, which also imports midi files) you can get for free with the DirectX SDK extras, and DirectMusic itself is very well documented.

Concerning your original question on how oldschool 2D gaming consoles store their music, it''s actually quite similare to MIDI. Basically, you have a partition with notes and the likes, and sound files played at a varying pitch to mimic notes.

The NES had four channels: a sine wave, a sawtooth wave, a triangle wave, and some other "bass" simulation. Music AND sounds were acheived by applying varying tensions on the four channels. The GameBoy did something similare.

The SNES used a programmable chip called the SPC7000. The instruments were stored in the game rom as sounds and were loaded into the chip, along with a programmable partition (notes and all that stuff). The chip would then play by adjusting the pitch and duration of the various "instrument" waves. This is, frankly, the exact same set-up than MIDI.

Newer games use compressed music formats somewhat like, say, MP3 or OGG (which, really, isn''t THAT different in size from MP3).

It all boils down to this: use MIDI. Oh, wait, rather... use MIDI properly You can do a lot more with it than you probably think. A LOT more.

quote:i downloaded a file converter and converted one of his mp3''s to an off, and the file size went from 1 meg to 2.3 megs.

NEVER convert an MP3 to an OGG, or otherwise convert data encoded lossily to another lossy format. Not only do you lose quality, but the file size can go way up, just as your example illustrates.

So, even though everyone should know this already, here are the rules:
lossless --> lossy: OK (quality and size decrease)
lossy --> lossless: OK (identical quality, but size increases)
lossy --> lossy: BAD (quality decreases and size increases; both dramatically)

quote:Original post by RuneLancer
The NES had four channels: a sine wave, a sawtooth wave, a triangle wave, and some other "bass" simulation.

White noise on the last channel, I thought.

And it takes a fair amount of skill to hack out anything that sounds at all good on that kind of setup :\ But yeah, you can do a lot with MIDI. If you do decide to go with OGG, remember there is a quality setting you can use when encoding - you can crank it way down and still get a better-sounding result than what you''re probably thinking of when you think of MIDI.