Isn't General MIDI simply the mapping of certain instruments to certain numeric IDs? It doesn't dictate the actual sounds or samples that are used, does it?
Given that, why would it sound worse than any other means of triggering the same instruments?
I like that your go-to for prog rock is "Eye in the Sky." I really can't fault it; my first thought was that technically Yes is more iconic of the genre, but it's probably less-known by younger people; if only for the Bulls oddly using Alan Parsons as their intro.
Now THAT I thought was a strange choice... Alan Parsons Project for a bombastic sports-stadium entrance.
It's not free. They didn't have a business model for most of their existence.
Google, famously shitty at branding (and that's being kind), paid an obscene $1.6B for YouTube because "Google Video" was a monumental failure. Of course it was: Everyone thought it was just a search engine for video, not something that you would contribute to... any more than an individual "contributed" to Google's search results.
So they rewarded an enterprise that had no business plan.
The thing does seem awesome, except I don't see any mention of:
1. Hardware sprites (except in Wikipedia in regard to one TI chipset)
2. Redefinable character sets
3. Fine scrolling
4. Mixed graphics modes
These are what made the Atari 8-bits so powerful. Did the MSXs have some of those (or similar) features? Given all the other cool things mentioned, it would be odd for them not to.
Yes, it's a little confusing because these Yamaha VDPs were a mostly backward compatible product line which evolved over time, starting with the v9918 in the TI 99/4. The MSX2+ featured the v9958 which did have 8 sprites (with rotation), tilemaps plus line, row and column scroll. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_V9958. It didn't have specific hardware for per-scanline mode switches (ala Amiga's Copper chip) but you could still accomplish such effects by old-school "baby-sitting the beam". Technically, the 6309 was specced running at up to 3.5 MHz, so we'd be overclocking it by 0.08 MHz to get it at the NTSC color burst frequency making such Copper-like timing tricks even easier to do with just the CPU, but we already know it'll easily run at that. Tangentially, this is the same reason the Amiga under-clocked an 8 MHz 68000 CPU to 7.16 MHz (2x color burst).
The confusing part is that, while the v9990 was the last, most advanced chip in the line - it ended up being artificially compromised because it was supposed to ship as the backward-compatible v9978 chip that MSX3 was going to be based on. But that chip ended up being late, so as a stopgap MSX2+ was created instead, with more RAM and an additional RISC CPU bolted on but no new VDP. Shortly after, the market moved on and MSX3 was cancelled. ASCII (who controlled the MSX platform rights) was still pissed at Yamaha for being late on the design (which they blamed for largely killing MSX's chance at survival by delaying MSX3 to death). So, when Yamaha later asked if they could offer the now-complete v9978 to other manufacturers, ASCII required them to remove some of the backward compatible aspects, including the sprites, tiles, scrolling and some bitmap stuff. So, the v9990 ended up shipping with more advanced features in some ways but in other ways nerfed by the arbitrary removal of some capabilities which were already in the base v9958 design before the v9978 improvements were even added.
As it turned out, the v9990 chip was never adopted by any computer platform and was only used in some low-volume MSX expansion cards made by small third-party add-on companies (which is what OP has in his system). Thus, the only computers actually running a v9990 are MSX2 machines which already have a v9958. So those systems have the best of both (since one can overlay on the other).
So, when we talk about the fantasy "Ultimate 8-bit", what we'd really like to spec is the v9978 which existed as finished prototypes in Yamaha engineering but never actually shipped in volume. If we want to stick with a hard "must have been a shipping part" rule, then we'd be left with speccing a v9958 + v9990 (as the OP has). The v9978 was basically just the intersection of those two feature sets, except in one chip. While no samples of the v9978 exist in the wild, the datasheet does exist: https://www.datasheets360.com/pdf/1236193767330354046
Such a 6309 + v9978 + OP4 system with 128K RAM in an Atari XEGS-like hybrid console/computer design and based on the highly-evolved MSX2+ Extended Basic ROMs (the pinnacle of MSFT's ROMs for home computers) would have been a world-beater. It could have shipped in 1988 at $149 in volume ($199 with keyboard) and easily blown away it's 8-bit console and computer competition. With clever coding, games would have looked very close to what the state-of-the-art Amiga could do and in terms of multimedia images, it's 15-bit 32,768 color stills would be even better than the Amiga's 12-bit HAM mode, yet available at less than a quarter of the Amiga 500's $800 MSRP.
Best of all it would have been a game and demo coders dream, with video and sound hardware to handle best-in-class game generation (8 sprites, tilemaps, row, line and column scroll, blitter, palette cycling, scanline interrupt mode tricks, etc), DX7-type FM synthesis and noise generation AND a "68000 Jr"-class CPU running like a bat out of hell with enough headroom to render a lot of high-value real-time objects over the tilemap and under the sprites. That's a killer combination the world never got in 8-bit platforms and didn't get in 16-bit until the Sega Mega Drive (aka Genesis). In the 8-bit era, whether computer or game console, we either got good graphics and sound hardware OR we got a powerful CPU but never both in the same machine where they could work together. It's the combination of the two that unlocked such unprecedented and surprising performance in the Amiga and, later, the Sega Genesis. And at $149 this machine could easily have been a best-seller by Xmas 1988 and had runway for a terrific 3+ year lifecycle. Even at Xmas 1992 it would still have been competitive, if not class-leader, at $99 with a mature game library.
The problem with an 8-bit CPU like the Z80 will have a hard time to control all that hardware. Indeed, KAI magazine, who make lots of games that support both the v9990 and OPL4 state exactly that.
Yes, I agree. That's why I specced the 6809/6309 instead of the Z80. Clock for clock the 6309 is nearly twice as performant as the Z80 even though it's also an 8-bit CPU.
It was also fun. The "Reveal" icon is a guy who opens his trenchcoat when you roll over it.
Missing the late Peter Warner, designer.
Fun historical note: When Steve Jobs flew the Shake team up to Cupertino, he came to lunch for a meet-&-greet. He sat down and said some things; among them was, "Yeah, you guys built this cross-platform UI that looks the same on every platform... but we have people here who know more about UI than you ever will."
Needless to say, the Shake UI remained intact for the rest of its days.
People were shocked, SHOCKED, that we weren't willing to use the apple-standard file browser. I had the hardest time explaining to them that users would rather see something like "filename.1-2000#.tif" instead of, you know, 2000 individual filenames...
I think Steve Jobs was always kind of pissed that he couldn't get away with dumbing-down Shake. But when your clients are Peter Jackson's WETA, and ILM, you're not going to be able to put Lord of the Rings and King Kong on your homepage (which Apple loved to do) if you cripple their primary effects tool.
And in addition to the companies you mention, there was also Pixar, which of course he was also running. He was probably even more pissed that Catmull wasn't willing to dump all of Pixar's Linux machines and use Macs :)
No. Some of the retiming stuff that was added to Shake later was also added to Motion/FCP. But the whole point of Motion was to leverage GPU power to produce swoopy, polished-looking motion graphics with minimal keyframing and rendering. And at that it excels. It was built mostly by the former Effect team from Discreet, after Apple brought the whole team in; right after Shake & team.
I created some commercial-grade (or better) DVD menus with Motion back in the day. Even now if I have to prepare some kind of glossy promo for something, I use Motion.
But for the ultimate quality I always turned to Shake. I knew it wasn't doing anything dumb that would degrade the image.
This is correct. The Shake team and the Motion team shared office space but other than maybe some very tiny bits of code-sharing (like the retiming mentioned), the Motion app was built entirely by the guys that came over from Discreet.
Given that, why would it sound worse than any other means of triggering the same instruments?