Re: Apple Drops Backward Compatibility for Next MacOS

[pubpc1@library.ucla.edu]

Paul Ho <paulcho@w3com.com> wrote:
>Mitchell Spector wrote:
>> 
>[...]
>>     I highly disagree. With the expection of AV Macs with DSP chips, all
>> past and current Macintosh systems have very limited sound capabilities.
>[...]
>>     There are _no_ music synthesis capabilities available! Not even something
>> as basic as FM-synthesis, which was popular a few years back on IBM PC with
>> cards such as the AdLib and SoundBlaster. Today PC's have wavetable music
>> cards, a more advanced version of the Ensoniq the Apple IIgs used. 
>
>From my Inside Mac Vol II (1985), the original ROM Sound Driver (from
>the pre-Mac Plus era) support 3 synthesizer:
>1) four-tone synthesizer: 
>	make simple harmonic tones, with up to 4 voice, use 50% of CPU time.
>2) square-wave synthesizer
>	make beeps, use 2% CPU time
>3) free-form synthesizer
>	use to make complex music and speech, use 20% of CPU
>[ You can call this wave table syn! ]

It is a wavetable, not not synthesis.  A 256 byte wavetable to be precise.

Pretty bad.  In order to play a long sound (>256 bytes) at 22kHz, you have
to dedicate 100% of the processor time to it.

It paled even in comparison to the C64's SID chip.