> Let's replace things in the context: we were talking about playing MIDI > files. MIDI is inherently about using 'traditional' instruments, and > designed on synth hardware (most of the time from Roland) that provides > a full-blown orchestra on a chip. Therefore playing MIDI on anything > that doesn't provide a guitar, an oboe, piano and what not, will simply > sound poor. The problem with this line of argument is that FM is quite capable of providing a wide variety of sounds, including passable mimicries of many traditional instruments. (The simplified two-operator FM in PC sound cards significantly less so than, say, the DX7, but still.) The problem is that very few people who put together General MIDI patch sets for FM sound cards actually knew how to create good FM sounds - it takes a lot of learning, and most of them didn't bother. (Demosceners did a much better job overall, but they never bothered with MIDI because they were all used to custom tracker-style formats.) So the vast majority of MIDI playback on FM is using extremely amateur patch sets that make everything sound like a collage of farts, nose honking, and scraping metal, when there's really no reason it couldn't have sounded at least as good as the MT-32.
> But of course it doesn't mean FM is poor by nature - I totally agree it > can be used for really nice tunes. I even heard very nice music coming > out of my Famicom 25 years ago. But this doesn't mean FM (or the > Famicom) won't sound poor when trying to play actual MIDI data. Ah, the Famicom wasn't FM. (Well, Konami did release one game - LaGrange Point - with a modified OPLL chip in the cartridge but other than that.) It was just simple waveforms, not even filtered like the SID. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
