EDIT: I fucked up!!! goldsrc first used MILES for post-2001/pre-steam multiplayer voice chat since 1.1.0.8!!!! speex was steam-era!!!! my nostalgia was a couple years late, and that's probably because that's when micspam really took off. my speex recreation was WRONG, even though it was similarly fucked.
gravis pulled through, this is the 100% genuine and authentic reproduction, go here and scroll to the last post instead: https://cohost.org/cathoderaydude/post/4085453-i-reproduced-bobskun thanks @cathoderaydude and @isyourguy for getting it right.
original post:
like original retail WON half-life (well, honestly, a couple years of patching later, 1.1.0.8 from sept. 2001) voice chat used the speex MILES speech codec, it was really bad because it had to do two things: encode/decode on our 400mhz shitboxes that are already busy with crowbars and gluon guns, and send/receive it over a 33.6kbps link that is also trying to shout at us where all our snarks are presently located and going
BUT you could talk to people! with your mic! on the computer! while you shoot them and not have to stop to type!!! INNOVATION
rather quickly someone (who happened to be the garry newman who would then to go on to create garry's mod, go figure!!!) figured out how to pipe in a specifically rated/sampled wave file directly
he released it with the fucking most incredible sailor's hornpipe/popeye ass song possible and you really should hear it before what i'm gonna drop in the next post
THIS. THIS RIGHT HERE. is ALMOST what it sounded like when it was coming through, and it was overpowering most of the other audio, including the breaking up screams of two or more people shouting "TURN IT OFFFFF" while shotguns and explosions and rapid fire glocks and sentry guns and terrorists win is going off at the same time, with a few bonus pauses because of dropped UDP buffer simulated in
i hadn't heard it like this for at least 15 years because they removed the speex MILES codec in favor of a marginally better but much less funny one (speex), and then replaced it again later with opus or whatever steam voice is called i think
but i found an old speex encoder and cranked it down to a low bitrate hoping to emulate what WON/retail goldsrc used for voice chat and, friends,
it felt like recovering the lost last words of my great grandfather from an edison wax cylinder except those last words are "are you guys going trick or treating"
it was a while ago i did this and i only now posted about it
More or less the params I used:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Speex\speexenc.exe" --quality 2 --bitrate 24 --comp 1 voice_input.wav voice_input-speex.wav
I also did some fucking with it in Audacity.
to get it right, input sound must be mono, 16-bit, 8000khz PCM
This is using Speex 1.0.4 from 2004
still useful and funny if you want to make some really fucked up audio
