Typical American and European attributes of NES games

[mikejmoffitt]

Actually, I don't think the game uses the DPCM channel for music, aside for "Title Theme With Drums". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCFqF-IeeAk

Battletoads never uses any DPCM in its soundtrack.

The title theme with drums, and the pause music are both full-CPU-control PCM sounds. Some of the sound effects in game are PCM sounds too (briefly halting gameplay and/or messing up the parallax effect timing when they happen).

For the title screen, is there any significant reason they didn't use DPCM? For something static like the title screen it doesn't make a lot of sense to me, and I'm not sure there's a perceivable quality difference. In-game makes a little more sense for the sake of timing, but even with the timed PCM the parallax effects get screwy sometimes as you mentioned.

[rainwarrior]

I don't think there's any technical reason. They're just goofballs.

[tepples]

I guess they found it acceptable as 32K banks means they'd have to go to another bank anyway to play the audio, and the DMA would steal enough cycles to mess up cycle-timed raster splits anyway.

[freem]

[Robocop 3's] Title screen music is awesome, though I like the C64 version just a little better.

It's the SID bass that makes the difference. It's pretty funny how the NES and C64 versions sound pretty much exactly alike in the intro.

And on NES we have the example of Skate or Die vs. Skate or Die 2: The Search for Double Trouble for what the music sounds like with and without Konami's influence.

Well, Konami didn't have Rob Hubbard, and Skate or Die NES port was produced before Konami started abusing DPCM samples in their songs...

The C64 version of the Skate or Die theme is just awesome. BTW, is this Youtube video a fabrication (increased pitch and speed for "NTSC version") or real? Some comments claim it's real.

It sounds pretty similar to the MP3 I've downloaded from Stone Oakvalley's site, which says it was recorded on a NTSC machine. I've never owned a C64 or C64 Skate or Die though, so I couldn't tell you 100% percent.

[rainwarrior]

I guess they found it acceptable as 32K banks means they'd have to go to another bank anyway to play the audio

I don't think this problem applies here. The PCM samples are tied to one bank just as much as DPCM samples would be. They get interrupted at 60hz intervals causing a buzzy degradation of quality when the ongoing updates have to do other things besides just PCM. This is mitigated a bit by the samples just being quick percussive things.

the DMA would steal enough cycles to mess up cycle-timed raster splits anyway.

Again, not relevant to their use here because they didn't preserve raster splits when using PCM, either.

They even dropped the drums from the title theme during moments where the animation was more complicated; they cut in and out at arbitrary points, very unmusically. Clearly there were compromises being made, and PCM was not working out in an ideal way for them.

I can't speculate as to why they used PCM, but I honestly can't think of any compelling reason to use it instead of DPCM, at least in all the cases they did happen to use it. There are sample quality differences, of course, but I don't think this alone is much of a reason, all of these things could have sounded just as well with DPCM and/or other APU SFX. I believe somebody on the team just liked PCM.

[Pokun]

European games often use an isometric view.

[Revenant]

I definitely think that a stylistic trait of European games is having sound effects or music but not both at once (and when there is both, they don't share the same channels.)

This is really noticeable in Robocop 3, where all the in-game music uses just one pulse channel. Title screen music is awesome, though I like the C64 version just a little better.

The C64 version of Robocop 3 also has several tunes that only use one channel, but they benefit massively from C64 audio channels not being restricted to a single waveform. It leads one to think that the C64 is the original version and the NES one was just a quick adaptation, but I seem to remember Jeroen Tel stating somewhere that the NES version of the soundtrack was actually produced first (though I don't remember where I would have read that...)