The Apprentice on CD-i is a platform game developed by The Vision Factory in 1994. It is capable of playing SFX and musix simultaneously thanks to using the extra memory of the DVC. The box however does not say it requires the DVC. Did they go with that approach to achieve higher quality sound effects or something?
The Apprentice actually uses only the extra memory of the DVC for the sound effects, it does not use the MPEG audio path. CD-i Fan goes into more detail: "The Apprentice uses "regular" ADPCM sound effect mixing. Stereo ADPCM music is streamed from disc with one silent channel, into which the title adds the sound effects in memory before it is played; the left-right-mixer is used to mix the channels into a combined mono music+sfx sound. The mixing is basic ADPCM data manipulation, the hard part to get this right is the timing. The Apprentice needs the extra memory to store the sound effects and free up some system capacity for mixing (the DVC memory is faster). The Apprentice plays stereo CDDA music if you disable the sound effects; if you enable them you get mono ADPCM."
You can find more technical details here.
Was it also used for smoother scrolling? CD-i Fan: "Perhaps indirectly by using the faster DVC ram for running sprite code, but there is no algorithmic change that I’m aware of."
[Thanks, Jorne, CD-i Fan]
