Comment by pornel
3 days ago
Off-loads sample mixing to the sound card. Computers of that era were slow enough that doing 44100 additions per second was expensive (IIRC quake had 8Khz samples anyway).
3 days ago
Off-loads sample mixing to the sound card. Computers of that era were slow enough that doing 44100 additions per second was expensive (IIRC quake had 8Khz samples anyway).
Something that always seems to surprise me when I remember it today: Playing an MP3 on my Pentium CPU in 1996 worked, but it _really_ brought the system to its knees. I could choose between listening to MP3 music or interacting with some other program (mIRC, Netscape, etc) but certainly not both.
That probably had more to do with decompression than sound mixing though, right?
Decompression in conjunction with primitive multi-tasking on MacOS and Windows. That remained an issue until Windows XP.
(Very small groups of) people used be in awe at LAN parties when I showed them how Linux could play an MP3 without stutters while copying large files across the network and browsing images.
Then it was time to play games and people were less impressed by me not being able to join any other game than Quake...
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