That's cool! I remember seeing those sorts of tricks in Amiga mods especially.
I jumped from the 8-bit (3 channel) world straight to a 486sx, so getting 16 channels seemed incredible at the time. I soon found out that going above 8 was ill-advised :) The sample size was limited to 64k too, so even if you did bounce tracks together you might only be able to load a few seconds.
File size in general felt like a big deal back then. Going over 100k for the whole mod was considered pretty excessive. I think Fast Tracker 2 ushered in the era of larger samples. I suppose it coincided with modems getting faster too, so people were less reluctant to download songs that got up into the megabyte range.
The demoscene stuff always seemed especially clever to me, because they didn't have the benefit of dedicating the entire computer just to mixing and playback - they needed to display graphics too! I think you can often tell when composers came out of the demoscene by listening for stuff like "J37" arpeggios and the sort of breakdown like in 64-Mania where you play the same sequence in two channels with slightly different settings to create a phasing or chorus effect.
I jumped from the 8-bit (3 channel) world straight to a 486sx, so getting 16 channels seemed incredible at the time. I soon found out that going above 8 was ill-advised :) The sample size was limited to 64k too, so even if you did bounce tracks together you might only be able to load a few seconds.
File size in general felt like a big deal back then. Going over 100k for the whole mod was considered pretty excessive. I think Fast Tracker 2 ushered in the era of larger samples. I suppose it coincided with modems getting faster too, so people were less reluctant to download songs that got up into the megabyte range.
The demoscene stuff always seemed especially clever to me, because they didn't have the benefit of dedicating the entire computer just to mixing and playback - they needed to display graphics too! I think you can often tell when composers came out of the demoscene by listening for stuff like "J37" arpeggios and the sort of breakdown like in 64-Mania where you play the same sequence in two channels with slightly different settings to create a phasing or chorus effect.