This strange unproductive demographic spout some really weird theories on Youtube which everyone seems to believe. Let's stop this dancing mania while there's still a chance.
Gamers like to use the word "Soundfont" to describe sets of samples used in game music.
Soundfont is a (long defunct?) trademark of Creative Labs for something they introduced in their AWE32 soundcards in 1994. It lasted through the early Soundblaster Audigy era and then seems to have faded away in the 2000s. It was never really used outside of Creative Labs products.
Games on PCs did sometimes use a similar format - called DLS or DownLoadable Sounds. But apart from basic functionality, this format shares nothing in common with Creative's Soundfont format.
On games consoles, it's all proprietary. Every system had its own set of proprietary development tools for sound.
Yes, I know what you mean when you say "it's using the xxx Soundfont" but it just sounds silly. It's using a set of samples. Or just one sample. They don't all come as one package you know. That was an AWE32 soundcard thing in 1994. It didn't catch on for a reason!
Yes, I've seen those videos too. They're probably wrong.
OK, I don't know what the composer actually used for sure, but I was around making music in the 90s and know what sort of gear people actually used. I also have a working pair of ears!
The so-called DX7 electric piano sound? That's not a DX7, not by a long stretch. It's the Korg O1/W's electric piano, a very popular (but very mediocre-sounding) synth at the time. The DX7 was considered totally obsolete and relegated to the dustbin of history by the mid-90s. Yes it's a knockoff of the DX7 sound, but every synth since 1983 has had a knockoff preloaded! For a time in the 80s, you couldn't even sell a synth unless it could be heard to match the DX7.
The Sound Canvas "pan flute" sounds? They're off the Roland JV-1080 rack module - a mainstay in every composer's studio from 1994 to about 2005. Yes, some Sound Canvas models had some cut-down versions of patches from the JV-1080. But the Sound Canvas is something made for hobby composers and Karaoke enthusiasts. It is not a studio tool.
The legend of the Sound Canvas seems to gain some traction because it was regarded as the "gold standard" of sound for the PC at home. Some computer games composers did in fact have Sound Canvases in their studios, but this was to hear how the music would sound at home. You wouldn't use it to rip samples from, or to record CD audio pieces!
Not that you could rip samples from a Sound Canvas even if you tried. You can't edit the patches on a Sound Canvas - remember, it's a hobbyist's tool. So you'd end up recording the effects and filter envelope embedded in the patch. No chance are you going to cleanly loop that!
Back to the Super Mario 64 soundtrack. From what I can hear, the whole lot is just stock sounds ripped straight from the Korg M1, O1/W, Roland JV-1080 and E-mu Proteus/2. No editing of patches, just the least-effort approach. I know a lot of people's childhoods don't want to accept that. I'm sorry Santa isn't real!
The typical synth line up in your average media composer's studio in the mid-90s looked like this:
Analogue? What analogue?!
That's why TV show and computer game music from the 90s sounds so cheesy!
Some whipper-snappers may not realise this, but Doom was REALLY hard to run back in the day. You needed a fast 486 costing more than several decent used cars. Most people did not have PCs back then, and the typical stock Amiga 500 (or Atari ST) stood no chance of running Doom no matter how good the port.
Even today, Doom still needs supercomputer-level hardware to run. Some people have made Doom-like games which run on lower-end hardware, sure. But if it's not an exact pixel-perfect replica of the original game, can it really be called Doom? I don't think a wire-frame rendition is going to count! The line must be drawn somewhere.
Now, Tetris might just about run on everything. Not Doom though. Not a chance.
The reason it's a meme? Because it's so incredibly hard to run a game like Doom on lower-end hardware. Not because it's easy to port!
They're not video games. They're computer games. NES was not a big success in much of the world. People wanted computers not dumb boxes. Stop re-writing history, revisionist yanks!!!
If you grew up in a country that isn't the US of A (i.e. nearly everyone), go and research the culture you actually belong to. The Americans would looooove to sell you a replacement culture for the low low price of 9 dollars 99 cents. Termsandconditionapplyyoumaynotbeeligibleforthisspecialoffer.
Oh great, another flat panel versus CRT argument again.
OLEDs are good in many ways. They are sharper, higher resolution, larger. They work well as a daily monitor for every task (if you can stand the screen burn).
But if you must compare an OLED monitor to a CRT monitor in terms of lag and motion blur? The OLED will be destroyed by the CRT.
Lag is common to flat panel technologies but doesn't exist with CRTs. You could in theory design a lag-free flat panel (even if nobody seems to have done it yet), so I'll ignore it here.
Why is there motion blur on OLED and LCD?
Motion blur on a flat panel comes from two sources. One is the panel itself. This only applies to LCDs and not OLED. I'll ignore that. The second is the human retina.
Wait, isn't the human retina also involved when using a CRT?
A CRT displays the image very differently to flat panel technologies. Instead of displaying a static frame for the duration, a CRT can only display a single extremely bright dot. The rest of the screen is in near-darkness.
As your eye moves smoothly across the screen following a moving object, each spot on the retina gets "hit" for only a few nanoseconds once every frame. You see a perfect snapshot of the moving object. It's like dancing under a stroboscope at a rave - despite moving around quickly, there is no motion blur. the slow response time of the retina is bypassed by this strobing.
Flat panels work differently. They display the whole image at once, holding that image until a new frame comes along. This is like dancing under ordinary lighting - rapid movements get blurred.
If you follow a moving object on a flat panel, your eyes move smoothly across the face of the screen. But the image is not moving smoothly with your eye - it is displaying a static image, then jumping to the next frame. Ideally you want your eyes to move in sudden steps each time a new frame comes along. But the eye is biological, it can't do that. It moves smoothly.
So from the retina's perspective, the object you're following spends the duration of the frame moving backwards (because the eye muscles are dragging it across the screen), then jumps forwards again to its original position when the new frame arrives. Over and over.
The result? The object is "smeared" all across your retina. Motion blur!
Some LCDs try to avoid this by having an array of very bright single-line backlights. The screen is "scanned" from the top down. Each pixel turns into a stroboscope and some of the motion blur goes away. It's not perfect because LCDs are inherently slow to respond. But it helps.
OLEDs sadly have no way out. You can't scan a large OLED panel from the top down. Let's say the screen is 2000 pixels tall. If you were to only illuminate each line one at a time, each line needs to be 2000 times brighter to make up for the other 1999 lines being dark at any one time.
LEDs can't handle this kind of peak current, let alone the even more fragile OLEDs!
The only future for blur-free OLED screens is those running at very high frame rates. Somewhere around 500 frames per second will give you CRT-like performance. You could lower it to 250 frames per second with black frame insertion. That is, the computer sends 250 frames per second to the monitor. But the monitor actually draws 500 frames per second, half of which are black. The screen is half the brightness, but it lessens the load on the computer.
But playing classic games perfectly which were hard-coded to run at 50, 60 or 70 frames per second? Sorry, no chance. You'd have to process the output from the game to increase its framerate. This is called motion estimation and has a lot of problems. It can introduce lag, and you see artifacts around moving objects. Not surprising, the motion estimator has to do a cut-and-paste job in realtime on the picture. It has to create in-between frames that don't exist!
So for those classic games, keep your CRTs. They will never be out-performed for what they do.