mrcleanup@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I think people may be missing a big factor in their replies. The graphics and audio on video games is digital, but music and video used in the rest of the world had been maturing for quite some time as analog.
Think about a record, you are capturing the vibrations of the noise directly into physical media. Digital requires translating that somehow into a pattern of 1s and 0s, and at the beginning, we just weren’t that good at it and memory chips were just painfully small at that time.
PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
In 1995 CDs were already well-established and quickly becoming the standard. Dgital audio had already been around for decades, and the main distribution method was digital.
mrcleanup@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I think you are getting too caught up in their stating “1995”. Video game graphics had already improved a lot by then. By talking about “pixelated” they probably really mean mid to late 80s technology. Heck, even in 1995 they were still using digital video disks the size of records.
When you compare that to the amount of memory in video game consoles, they had to keep things simple and couldn’t afford to go fill professional digital audio.
PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
This was my point. The problem wasn’t digital verus analog. It was more that home computers couldn’t run something as complex as a game with resources that high-quality. Even 3D games following 1995 (since that was the start of at-home, 3D games) were running at low resolutions with low poly, low-res assets and lower quality sound.