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SvennoJ on 22 October 2025
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Kyuu said:
Zippy6 said:

Speaking of sound chips. This is a bit off topic but I found this video very interesting.


That game soundtracks sounded completely different on dos games depending on your hardware and that the highest quality soundtrack probably less than 1% of gamers had access to.

DOS was just before my time so I don't have any experience with this but was very cool to hear the different versions of the soundtracks compared.

I played Touhou 8 Imperishable Night (2004 Windows indie game). The game lets you choose between WAV and MIDI. The WAV option is your standard boring recorded format. MIDI is infinite, because it's a language. Every singer (synthesizer) will sing differently.

I would choose the MIDI option, connect the game to my synth (Roland Juno-DS) and let it sing. You get access to every channel and can change the instruments, volume levels, effects etc. The expressions are endless even when connected to a single synthesizer. It felt so alive and amazing.

Rich DOS players experienced this decades before me lol.

I went the other way, mod players were our thing at the time.



We made our own DAC converters to play the music on an amplifier via the printer port instead of PC speaker. (See 2:15 in the video) It wasn't as neat as in the video (card hanging loose) but it worked.

Amazing what could be achieved with just 4 channels.

Basically it was just a smart way to compress recorded music. Later versions also let you play music with samples on the keyboard, turning your keyboard into a well a 'keyboard' lol. 



I actually had a midi keyboard that connected to MSX. The cartridge plugged into the MSX like a game.

https://www.erixcollectables.nl/product/philips-midi-keyboard-with-cartridge-for-msx/

I had piano lessons on that as a kid, but was more interested in programming instead. So I ended up programming the sheet music into the MSX to play it for me lol.

It worked without the midi keyboard as well

Lot of things I didn't know it could do!