Re: Commodore 64 kills APPLE II

[realbacon@hotmail.com (Niklas Ramsberg)]

Jeff Blakeney <CUTjblakeney@sentex.net> wrote in message news:<3utl4vctdevlfe9287pmheeon7alnaekq9@4ax.com>...
> On Wed, 12 Feb 2003 23:15:37 GMT, "Stede Troisi"
> With respect to sound, the C64 beats a stock 8 bit Apple II any day.
> Again, with the slots (and even using other methods for the IIc and
> IIc+) it was possible to add sound hardware to these machines.  The
> SID chip in the C64 is limited to 3 voices (6 if you do a hardware mod
> to your motherboard and piggy back a second SID chip which was usually
> used to produce stereo sound) while that was the minimum number of
> voices you could get with add-on hardware for the Apple II IIRC.

> Now, when it comes to the Apple IIgs, the C64 loses hands down.  The
> IIgs' graphics was almost as good as the Amiga 500's (320x200 and
> 640x200 resolutions and up to 3200 colours on screen at once out of a
> palette of 4096).  The sound was better than the Amiga 500's as the
> IIgs has 16 voices as opposed to the Amiga's 4.
> 
> So to sum up, the C64 does have better graphics and sound than most 8
> bit Apple IIs but has worse graphics and sound than the Apple IIgs.

I agree with most of the things you say here, except for the parts
about sound. You cannot measure how good sound a computer has by how
many voices it can play. That's like saying that a piano is better
than a saxophone because you can play 88 notes at the same time on a
piano, while you can only play one note at a time on a saxophone. Or
to take it one step further: Ten screaming monkeys is better than one
Pavarotti. ;-)

IIRC, the IIgs sound chip is the same as in the Ensoniq Mirage, i.e.
it has 16 voices that plays 8-bit sampled and/or wavetable sounds
(they're not the same thing, even though that's what Creative has been
trying to make us believe) with the amplitude controlled by a separate
ADSR envelope for each voice. The C64's SID chip can play one 4-bit
sampled sound at a time (through some clever programming), so in the
area of reproducing acoustic instruments and voice the IIgs wins with
a K.O. in the first round.

The SID on the other hand excels at analog synth sounds; it is in fact
a quite good analog synthesizer, capable of generating sawtooth,
triangle or varaible-width pulse wave, or a combination of these on
each of the three voices. In addition, one voice can be hard-synched
to another and one voice can ring-modulate another. There's also a
separate ADSR envelope for each voice. Lastly, the voices are routed
to an analog filter that can be set to either lowpass, highpass or a
combination of the two and be controlled by an ADSR envelope. It also
includes resonance for those sweet filter sweeps. So when it comes to
classic analog synthesis, the C64 is the clear winner.

/Niklas Ramsberg
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