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Comment by antonvs | Hacker News Reader

Terrible headline. I’m not going to click that link because I won’t encourage ridiculous clickbait.

I agree. To explain further, it's easy as an outsider to call somebody else "lazy", but the outsider doesn't know how hard Id worked to finish Doom. Game development is famous for months-long crunch time death marches with 7-day 16-hour days. It's easy to say "you've been doing crunch for 6 months, here's another task for you: add PC speaker music" but it might be the thing that drives the game dev who has to do it over the edge. Are they being "lazy"? Are they just sitting around doing nothing, when they could be working on PC speaker music?

While it might have been possible to add PC speaker music, would it have been worth the effort at the time? How much would it have delayed the release of the game? Would anyone have cared very much about being able to have terrible quality music on their PC speaker?

Also all the sound stuff was outsourced! id hired Bobby Prince to make the music and licensed a playback library which seemed to have enough problems already with the supported sound cards. https://doomwiki.org/wiki/DMX

So they'd have had to extract this feature from a vendor where the relationship is already breaking down, or ditch it all and start from scratch with a new vendor, or inhouse code.

On top of that, the claim in the post seems to be based on the Linux Doom architecture, which has a separate sound service that didn’t exist in the original DOS version.

This is just someone cosplaying early 1990s development with the benefit of decades of subsequent OS and software design.

Agree, lazy is the last thing that comes to mind when I think about id Software, I don't like the title either.

John Carmack is not exactly known for being a lazy slacker. In fact, in the past few years he expressed his opinion that people should work longer hours if they're being serious about their work, and has gotten a bunch of push back for it.

Original, for the curious: https://web.archive.org/web/20251203002619/https://lenowo.or...

[id Software was Lazy - DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music!]

A friend had suggested it after I was struggling to come up with a suitable title and there sadly isn't a way to edit it after the fact.

nvm, found the option in phpBB to change it

The new title may still be misleading. Have you tested this on MS-DOS with 1993 hardware?

On Linux, `sndserver` is a separate process. On MS-DOS, it was not. On DOS, priority mixing would have to happen e.g. within Doom's tick processing or in the sound interrupt handler.

If you're just making these changes in Linux and assuming they could have worked in 1993, you're just cosplaying.

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