5.13.1 Sound Controls
On this screen, accessed by hitting ctrl-F, you'll find a few parameters
that you recognise from the 'x' menu handily gathered together, plus a
few new ones. You can find the descriptions for the basic parms over at
the Sound Parameters (p. 137) help.
The newer parameters now control whether fractint uses the PC speaker
for sound, as in previous versions, or the output of a sound card, or
both.
Your present Sound card may boast all manner of gizmos and wotnots but
fractint may well not be able to take advantage of them, this is simply
due to our not including umpteen different drivers for all the different
cards. Instead it just uses a simple approach that at least allows you
to use multimedia speakers for the various noises of which fractint is
capable.
This DOS version of fractint uses the current lowest common denominator
hardware among the variety of sound cards available, the yamaha OPL-3 FM
synthesizer chipset which is found in most sound cards from the original
AdLib, through the various soundblasters from creative labs, to the
numerous cards that emulate them.
The OPL-3 chipset has within it several 'voices', each capable of
generating sound independently of the others, and with a variety of
controllable parameters. See Advanced Sound Controls (p. 139) for
details.
The sound card volume control given here will be overridden by any
volume control applications that come with your OS, such as the windows
95 mixer control panel. Also, depending on your sound card and software,
the output of the OPL-3 chipset may be controlled by a slider named
'synth', 'midi',
or possibly 'legacy'... if in doubt, experiment :-)
The other parameter that needs explaining here is note pitch
quantisation. When this is enabled, tones that are to be played are
first rounded to the nearest note on the western even tempered scale
(i.e. the notes that you find on a piano) as opposed to the full
spectrum of frequencies. The Advanced Sound Controls (p. 139) screen
also has a facility to restrict the notes played further so that you can
produce tunes in a particular key, if you're so inclined.