The idea that sound designers on old games were totally siloed and ignorant of how their compositions would sound on final consumer hardware is completely wrong. Most of these composers were programmers themselves and knew exactly how to get the final hardware to make the sounds they wanted, even when they composed using more advanced tech.

Programmers using devkits (more powerful than the consumer hardware) likewise.

▲

stavros an hour ago | parent [-]

I don't understand what you mean. Nobody said they didn't know how their compositions would sound, my argument is that at least some of these composers would have chosen the more advanced interpolation method, if it were available.

	▲	Andrex 28 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I guess it's hard to stop my originalist tendencies from boiling over into other topics... What you're saying to me is like someone saying, well, if the piano had more octaves then existing compositions would have been better. But those pieces were composed with the current amount of octaves in mind in the first place... Maybe there's an analogue with the harpsichord-to-piano transition, but I'm not knowledgeable enough about that yet.