AGI Sound Tutorial - Limits of the AGI Sound Format
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The AGI sound format is modeled around the PCjr's sound chip. Because of this, we have to work around the idiosyncrasies of that particular chip. This involves:
- having three voice channels
- one noise channel
- can only define frequencies between the range of 110Hz to 111860Hz
- noise channel only has 3 different frequencies, or you can "borrow" the frequency from the third channel.
- creating AGI sounds from other formats create large files. The AGI interpreter has a very limited memory space.
- PC interpreter only plays the first channel and ignores the rest.
- sound resources cannot be discarded without calling a new room in the PC interpreter. You have to make sure all sounds are loaded at the start of each room.
Most of these we could work around by defining a new backwards-compatible format for the new interpreters but we still want to support the original Sierra interpreter. With simple music and a bit of originality, it shouldn't be too hard to create music for your game. Sierra's Police Quest had pretty realistic gun noises (if you had a computer that could play them).
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