4 ms·

The ‘improved’ versions sound muffled like I have water in my ears. Plus I’d rather hear the game as it was designed, artefacts and all.

• stavros 8mo ago
  The artifacts weren't a conscious design decision, they were a constraint. We don't know whether the designers would have chosen to keep them or not, if they had the choice.
  • snvzz 8mo ago
    GBA games were made for a console that behaved like this. Accuracy is paramount. Targeting else than the console's sound is an affront to preservation.
    • stavros 8mo ago
      Preservation and design intent are two very different things.
      • Andrex 8mo ago
        The idea that sound designers on old games were totally siloed and ignorant of how their compositions would sound on final consumer hardware is completely wrong. Most of these composers were programmers themselves and knew exactly how to get the final hardware to make the sounds they wanted, even when they composed using more advanced tech. Programmers using devkits (more powerful than the consumer hardware) likewise.
        • stavros 8mo ago
          I don't understand what you mean. Nobody said they didn't know how their compositions would sound, my argument is that at least some of these composers would have chosen the more advanced interpolation method, if it were available.
          • Andrex 8mo ago
            I guess it's hard to stop my originalist tendencies from boiling over into other topics... What you're saying to me is like someone saying, well, if the piano had more octaves then existing compositions would have been better. But those pieces were composed with the current amount of octaves in mind in the first place... Maybe there's an analogue with the harpsichord-to-piano transition, but I'm not knowledgeable enough about that yet.
            • deleted 8mo ago
              [deleted]
            • ralferoo 8mo ago
              Haha, my first gut reaction to reading your second paragraph was "No, it'd be better to compare it to compositions written for harpsichord and played on piano". I guess history has shown that most composers (and listeners) preferred the piano sound over the harpsichord sound the majority of the time.
        • Wowfunhappy 8mo ago
          That may be true, but the sound designers were still making the best of what they had. They could probably imagine how the same composition would sound better. When you play e.g. Gamecube games in an emulator, do you run them in 480p or do you render at a higher resolution? The former is clearly what the designers were targeting, but I think there’s rarely any benefit to eschewing higher resolutions. It just looks even better.
      • jimbooonooo 8mo ago
        sure, and you know what their design intent was right?
  • ErroneousBosh 8mo ago
    You say that, but it was quite common to "allow" a bit of aliasing in sampling back when we had very limited equipment, to introduce a bit of "sparkle" into percussive sounds that would otherwise be lost by low sampling rates. Given its spectral complexity can you even tell if a hihat sample is aliased?
  • boomlinde 8mo ago
    > The artifacts weren't a conscious design decision, they were a constraint. Of course the artifacts were a constraint. Whether consciously considered or not, constraints influence design decisions. > We don't know whether the designers would have chosen to keep them or not, if they had the choice. Maybe Frédéric Chopin would have written his etudes and nocturnes for the Roland SC-55 Goblins instrument patch if that choice had been available to him, but it wasn't. What we do know of are the choices he actually made facing the constraints that he actually faced. Similarly, maybe a GBA music composer would have preferred for the music to be a high fidelity recording of a full piano arrangement if that choice had been available to them. But it wasn't, so they didn't. We can speculate all we want about what creative choices might have been made if the people behind them were dealt a different hand, but in reality choices don't exist in isolation of constraints, and I think any line of reasoning trying to divorce the two is futile.