From: oahvenla@snakemail.hut.fi (Osma Ahvenlampi)
Newsgroups: alt.sys.amiga.demos
Subject: Re: Criti!
Date: 12 Dec 92 18:28:05 GMT
Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
Distribution: inet
	<1992Dec12.055946.20274@u.washington.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: lk-hp-4.hut.fi
In-reply-to: foregone@stein.u.washington.edu's message of Sat, 12 Dec 1992 05:59:46 GMT

In article <1992Dec12.055946.20274@u.washington.edu> foregone@stein.u.washington.edu (Carl Chavez) writes:

>I don't know what that means. I assume it means that Amigas use samples
>instead of lots and lots of clicks to create sound. That has been established;
>I'm merely saying that it IS possible to use non-sample sound on an Amiga,
>but it's EXTREMELY difficult.

Buy brains or something, will you? The clicks are made by altering the voltage
level on the audio output. Apple has two levels, on and off, C64 has 16, Amiga
has 256, nad CD players have 65536. The more levels, the better quality audio.
Sample is a list of values signifying those level changes.

>By the way, there were many programs for the Apple that used incredible
>programming tricks to make great sounds. Remember the old game Seadragon?
>Using ONLY clicks, it simulated the following sentences:

>"SEEEEEEEEEAAA DRAGON!"
>"Captain, the ship's computer is now ready. Please wait while I initialize
>systems."
>"Approaching maximum (pirate copy I have [I'm sorry!] garbles rest)"
>"Approaching Dragon Room! Destroy all bricks to free Dragon! Do NOT SHOOT
>Dragon!"

Those were samples.

>This blew me away when I first saw this in 1981-1982. No special hardware;
>no special DMA-sample-thingamajig stuff. Just real good programming. Now
>if demo writers keep saying that they want to challenge themselves by
>creating technically impressive demos, then I have a REAL challenge:

DMA is Direct Memory Access, which means that you can transfer memory without
using CPU for it. Why bog down the processor with simple, but time-consuming
things (you have to transfer at least 8000 values per second, to get anything
listenable.. That's about phone line quality), when you could use it for
something else?

>I DARE YOU GUYS - MAKE A DEMO WITH MUSIC AND SOUND BUT WITHOUT ANY SAMPLES!

On Amiga, that's impossible, because THE HARDWARE NEEDS SAMPLES TO PRODUCE
SOUND. COULD YOU BEAT THAT INTO YOUR HEAD, LIKE THIS YEAR?
 
>>And this is samples as opposed to hardware-level synth: you CAN do
>>synthesized sounds on the Amiga, but you have to essentially create a
>>sample mathematically and play it. There is nothing equivalant to, say, the
>>C64's SID chip in the Amy. (Though there IS a SID emulator, it works by
>>creating chunks of sounds and playing 'em.)
>>
>>And you can do sound manually, too, like you had to do on older machines,
>>but there's really no reason to do so most of the time.

>Well, there are some reasons...like making programing challenges and stuff...

Go away, and learn the basics of your computer before coming here and telling
people to not use samples. Maybe you'd like to see awesome graphics with no
display also?
--
Osma Ahvenlampi  -  oahvenla@snakemail.hut.fi   * Workstation power for micro-
All my opinions are not necessarily really mine * computer price: Amiga := FUN