Lave?

[Bumvelcrow]

For me it's the Roland synthesizer sounds from the PC version

Oh, that takes me back! I had a gravis ultrasound card at the time, which supposedly could emulate a roland, but in reality made a complete mess of anything it was trying to play. The sounds passing for music that came out of my speakers were not in keeping with the rest of the game!

It supposedly could emulate an adlib/soundblaster as well, and made a similar pig's ear out of that.

B

 

[Toumal]

Oh, that takes me back! I had a gravis ultrasound card at the time, which supposedly could emulate a roland, but in reality made a complete mess of anything it was trying to play. The sounds passing for music that came out of my speakers were not in keeping with the rest of the game!

It supposedly could emulate an adlib/soundblaster as well, and made a similar pig's ear out of that.

B

Sir, I take offense at your statement. Well kinda sorta. Not really
It's true that Roland emulation never really worked great. Soundblaster midi also sounded weird. But you know, this wasn't actually completely Gravis' fault. The way people wrote the music was streamlined for SB and/or Roland SoundCanvas, so sometimes they didn't bother to do a note release which was fine with SB because its midi patch had a really short amp envelope, whereas the Gravis had a much richer sound and sometimes much longer amp envelopes, more akin to what you'd expect from, say, a piano.

For a soundcard, it was really the cream of the crop back in the day, starting the trend of having a DSP on the card really do all the sample pushing and freeing up the CPU/DMA from that task.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEYseaH4elM

But yeah, what the old Elite would've needed is an optimized soundtrack. Descent did a great job with that, pretty much the best version of the midi soundtrack can be heard on the Ultrasound. Doom was another classic that, in my opinion, sounded a lot better with the GUS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diW3-y40wP0

 

[Bumvelcrow]

Sir, I take offense at your statement. Well kinda sorta. Not really

Excellent response, I've been pwned. Lovely card, shame not much supported it.

Most stuff sounded like poo, though!

B

P.S. What a pleasure it is to get into a Roland vs GUS vs soundplaster argument in 2014!

 

[Toumal]

P.S. What a pleasure it is to get into a Roland vs GUS vs soundplaster argument in 2014!

To be fair, the SoundCanvas was way too expensive for most people, and the GUS had the better hardware and sample/playback quality, plus it had more channels. It was priced similar to the high-end soundblasters but had it's own sample RAM and dedicated processor. And some games really did sound much much better on it, like whacky wheels:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iU8__YOylCA
vs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vdg28fnGPAk (title says adlib but it's the SB16 soundtrack)

But yeah, I feel like an old fart now, thanks. Then again these are the elite forums. Not many companies from that time are still around AND working on cutting edge stuff.

 

[russtd1]

It was all pretty dire back then!

 

[VR jefranklin18]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzEj4Gq7fT4

always worth a watch, talk about nostalgia

I still remember watching that for the first time on my Amiga 4000/030 (I had bought it at a computer fair in Earls Court and the sense of anticipation on the train home was palpable). I was seriously stoked as I knew that pretty much everything in the video could be found in the game. It was good to be a teenager back then

I would seriously love a modern rendition of the Frontier anthem to make it into Elite Dangerous.

 

[Crash_Happy]

Where's my Lave University jumper!