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Comment by code_duck | Hacker News Reader

It’s rather sad that this was the music in these otherwise excellent 80s PC games when earlier machines such as the Commodore 64 or even 8 bit contemporaries like the NES and Sega Master System had far superior audio capabilities. PC games for the most part skipped a lovely era of synthesized music.

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Most PC games from this era supported the Ad Lib, Roland MT-32, Soundblaster, etc.

Here is the game from the post running on DOS with various sound cards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr-84mjV3CI

Those do sound pretty nice. I wonder what the usage rate was for enhanced sound hardware. None of the systems I used up to the mid 90s had anything besides the PC speaker, even in the VGA era.

Not sure what the usage rate was. But the devices saw pretty wide support. For example the Roland was supported by 900 games, same with the Soundblaster

Roland: https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/dos/tic,1/ti,35/

Soundblaster: https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/dos/tic,1/ti,40/

PC games had great music by the late 80s, it just wasn't cheap. Sierra On-Line is notable for supporting the Roland MT-32, starting with King's Quest IV in 1988.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_MT-32

Many games supported digitized output over a DAC on the LPT port. I remember building one myself. There are many tutorials. A moderately fast 486 can output CD-Quality sample rates with such a thing. Covox had one in the 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covox_Speech_Thing

By way of compensation however, a few years later PC gamers could enjoy the FM synthesis of the Sound Blaster card or the PCM-based sounds of sound modules like the Roland Sound Canvas. A lot of PC game soundtracks from that era have aged very well and have become classics in their own right.

The Wing Commander 1 title theme on MT-32 is absolutely amazing.

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