+ Red Planet's sound effects were never files. They lived as samples inside + two Creative AWE32 cards, uploaded from a pair of soundbanks and played + back like an instrument — each sound a chord of up to four layers, every + layer with its own pitch, its own level and its own filter. The port that + brought the game to the desktop had those banks but not the cards, so the + layers were flattened into plain wav files, and a good deal was lost in + the flattening. +
++ The original banks have been read again, and the sounds rebuilt from + them. +
+ +| Pitch | ++ Every sound had been shipped at one flat rate with the banks' + tuning discarded, so most of them played at the wrong speed — the + worst by nine semitones. The deep layers suffered most, which is + why the game now has weight it did not have: a collision thud + that lasted a twentieth of a second is two thirds of a second at + the pitch it was written at. + | +
|---|---|
| Layers | ++ Ninety-three sounds were missing pieces — a hundred and + seventy-six layers in all, most of them the low rumble that sits + under collisions and explosions. + | +
| Distance | ++ Sounds carry across the arena on the curve the designers wrote + rather than fading to nothing in a straight line, and they get + duller as they get further away, as they did in the pod. + | +
| Space | ++ Anything outside the craft has the arena's reverb on it; the + cockpit stays dry. That contrast is how the pod told you which + side of the hull a sound was on. + | +
| Movement | ++ Passing craft change pitch as they pass. The port had this + backwards — approaching sounds dropped in pitch instead of + rising. + | +
+ If it is too much, that is what the knobs are for. + The cabinets ran the game at full level and did their shaping in + hardware — an amplifier and a three-way crossover behind the seat, out + of the player's reach. Your desk has neither, so + PgUp and PgDn stand in for the amplifier and + Home and End for the crossover's low band. Both move + while you play, and both stay where you leave them. The bass control + works on the deep layers only, so turning it down takes the weight out + of the collisions without dulling anything else. +
+
- Four files in the game folder are yours. None of them ship. The
+ Six files in the game folder are yours. None of them ship. The
game writes each one the first time it needs it and then never touches
it again, so a new build dropped over this folder keeps everything you
have set — and deleting any of them simply starts that part over with
@@ -1357,6 +1446,22 @@
flag. Only written when RP412MFDLAYOUT=save.
+
RP412AUDIOVOLUME once it exists; delete it to go
+ back to that.
+ RP412AUDIOBASS.
+