Also at 1:30...

You can actually get those "Thug Life" 16 bit sunglasses???

DO WANT!

The 8 bit movies cheat a bit too, they are all using a mix of 8-bit and 16-bit looking graphics. This one seems to be mostly a mix of the look of early Amiga games and late c64.

That actually looks like it could be a quite good 16-bit game.

tl;dr: No, not really and no, probably not.

-

MP3 compression methods are pretty good these days. A well encoded mp3 sounds quite good at 224k. 320k is ideal, but 224k sounds fine to me.

I think most people would be incredibly hard pressed to tell the difference between a well encoded 320k MP3 and a FLAC file.

To showcase this and hopefully answer your question through demonstration, I've put together an odd sound file here for ya: http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/837649/soundtest.wav

It's a 24bit 48kHz wav file of a piece of bright and full audio thrown together just for this (using 24-bit 48kHz audio sources). The audio loops a few times and each time it loops it's in a different format or quality.

The odd part is that I've dropped the audio volume down all the way to just barely above the 16-bit noise floor before exporting into each format, then cranked the volume back up again. Just to see what would happen.

Anyway, the play order is as follows:
1. Original 16-bit audio (sound normal, as it should.)
2. 16-bit audio re-gained (noise city - the 16-bit FLAC was the same.)
3. 24-bit audio re-gained (Sounds as good as the original.)
4. FLAC 24-bit re-gained (Sounds as good as the original.)
5. MP3 8 k re-gained (What?)
6. MP3 64 k re-gained (Sounds like a bad MP3, because it is. but, do note it's mostly just dull and a bit unstable sounding, not all weird like the 8k one.)
7. MP3 128 k re-gained (Pretty good, but still a bit dull. Not horrible though.)
8. MP3 224 k re-gained (Sounds as good as the original? Pretty close, I'd say.)
9. MP3 320 k re-gained (Sounds as good as the original as far as I'm concerned.)

This is just one test though. There are most certainly songs or sounds out there that wouldn't fare as well as this one. No idea what those would be though, as everything I've MP3-ified in the last decade or so sounds absolutely fine to me.

Thanks for the reply and sharing your expertise -- sounds like you'd confirm everything that the video said.

This probably just displays my ignorance more, but specifically with regards to the MP3 format, do you think it adds any noticeable compression artifacts even at high-quality settings? Part of my problem was that I was thinking of MP3 *bit*rate as sampling rate (128 kbit/s = 128 kHz, which is not at all correct). But still, MP3 is a lossy format (obviously since one can turn a 650M CD into ~60M of 128k MP3s, or still a large filesize savings even for 320k) and even my relatively untrained ear can sometimes hear the difference at low (say, 128k or lower) bitrates.

I guess that a music producer wouldn't record/master anything in a compressed format like MP3, so that is sort of entirely separate from the point of this video and your comment. But just out of curiosity, do you think that people can detect differences between a 16 bit 44 kHz uncompressed digital recording (flac maybe?) and a very high quality MP3 (say, 320 kbit)?

Going from 16 bits, to 24 bits will lower the noise floor which, if you have the audio turned up enough, you can hear it ever so slightly. It's not a huge difference and you're not going to hear it in a typical song. It's definitely there, but it's already insanely quiet at 16 bits. An "Audiophile" on pristine gear may notice the slight change in hiss in a moment of silence, with the speakers cranked up - but that's about it.

As for pushing up the sampling rate, when you get beyond 44.1kHz, you're not really dealing with anything musical anymore. All you're hearing, if you're hearing it at all, is "shimmer". or "air". It sounds "different" and you might be able to tell which is which, but it's one of those differences that doesn't really matter in effect. A 44.1khz track can still make ear-piercingly high frequencies - the added headroom just makes it glisten in a really inconsequential way.

This is coming from 17 years of music production. I've gone through all of this, over and over again, testing myself, trying to figure out what is and isn't important.

At the end of it all, I work on everything in 16bit 48kHz - I record audio files in 24 bit 48 kHz - then export as 16 bit 44.1kHz. I don't enable dither anymore. I don't buy pro-audio sound cards anymore. I don't use "studio monitors" anymore. I just take good care of my ears and make music now.

If you are going to restrict the video to a certain "genre" make it 16 bit in general. Many of these games were not exclusive to the Super NES. I won't be upvoting this for the lack of a VERY IMPORTANT idle animation that was missing - Sonic the Hedgehog.

I've played every single one of those games up until about the 2 minute mark. I probably enjoyed the 8/16 bit era more than anything else. I started out with an atari 2600..I remember playing "fire fighter" and thinking how amazing the graphics were. hehe. Adventure is the best game of all time.

16-bit graphics...8-bit sound

Some people may still wonder why there is such a legacy extension in Windows with supporting stuff that old, but there are plenty of companies out there that proving this. I've come across at least several examples of software I've seen from a vendor being sold as new that was likely built in Windows 3.1. 16-bit apps in 2010-2011? How do they even have the software to make this stuff anymore?

Regardless, it makes me thank whomever at Microsoft has the arduous task of having to make sure NTVDM still operates in modern versions of Windows. Well, except for 64-bit os where there is no longer 16-bit support, so perhaps this will force the hand of those still building legacy apps into this century.

>> ^pavel_one:

8-bit?
Don't think so.


The samples used are digitized and not FM synth which is usually what is implied when people say 8 bit chip tunes, but the samples are indeed 8bit. They also usually range from 8-22khz and are uncompressed. I think the only mod formats that support 16bit samples were XM and I think mtm (When I last looked up the scene, I saw that one of the formats was upgraded to support full 16 bit stereo samples).

8-bit?
Don't think so.
Depends on the sound card used. Hearing what appears to be both wavetable and PCM, I would say definitely 16-bit. The SoundBlaster Pro (16-bit) was released BEFORE the 1st release of Impulse Tracker, and I believe so was the AWE32.
Being wrong before, I could be again because, of course, all synthesis could be done in software using only 8-bits of the 16-bit registers of the 32-bit CPU on the 16-bit or 32-bit (or possibly 64-bit) bus in the 'puter.

I use the textures and clouds from this, the July version... http://www.retributiongames.com/quandary/

This items.png is rather nice http://www.agonyart.com/file/items.png

The nice sun/moon is from Mixcraft http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=31331

I would not recommend any HD pack to start with as it requires some extra fiddling to make them work. Kind of takes away the 16-bit look anyways.

Maybe he's albino.
>> ^Stu:

why oh why would someone spend weeks doing this when they could just go outside and play in the sun...

>> ^Stu:

why oh why would someone spend weeks doing this when they could just go outside and play in the sun...


From Wiki:
Asperger syndrome or Asperger's syndrome (English pronunciation: /æspɜrɡɜrz/) is an autism spectrum disorder that is characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction.

Playing in the sun isn't generally a lot of fun by yourself. No more fun then a computer could give you, anyway.