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.
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.
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.
Haha, my first gut reaction to reading your second paragraph was "No, it'd be better to compare it to compositions written for harpsichord and played on piano".
I guess history has shown that most composers (and listeners) preferred the piano sound over the harpsichord sound the majority of the time.
That may be true, but the sound designers were still making the best of what they had. They could probably imagine how the same composition would sound better.
When you play e.g. Gamecube games in an emulator, do you run them in 480p or do you render at a higher resolution? The former is clearly what the designers were targeting, but I think there’s rarely any benefit to eschewing higher resolutions. It just looks even better.
Accuracy is paramount. Targeting else than the console's sound is an affront to preservation.