TW #44 — Impulse Tracker Trivia (Random)
A coder's musing on a sentence in the impulse-tracker documentation about sound-card autodetection.
Key claims#
- IT's docs, explaining why the autodetect checks the SB16 first, said it "can support 64 channels at 45454Hz mixing speed (depending on a processor)" while "the most the GUS can support is 32 channels at 19kHz mixing speed" — an apples-and-oranges comparison: the SB16 figure is CPU software mixing, the GUS figure is the card's hardware limit (whose quality "drops off after 14 channels").
- Nothing stops a player from software-mixing on a GUS as well; with 14 clean hardware voices to mix into instead of the SB16's two, the same CPU could in theory mix seven times as many channels (448 at 44 kHz, "2368 channels on a GUS at 19Khz") — numbers he admits are not perfectly true (panning etc.) and useless beyond 64 channels.
Practical takeaways#
Historical context only: which card you owned decided how many channels a 1996 module could use and how it was mixed.
Notable quotes#
- "So, who will be the first to write a tracker capable of mixing 2368 channels on a GUS at 19Khz? =)"
Relevance#
A footnote for the sound-card era in the impulse-tracker entity (the manual's own figures: GUS 32 channels, AWE32 30, SB16 software mixing 64).