The popular opinion on Genesis vs SNES sound

[Bregalad]

It can't be argued that the SNES has better graphical capabilities than the Genesis, whose only real advantage is the higher horizontal resolution of 320 pixels (which does make a difference in some games).

So it can (and will) be agrued, right ? Often when comparing systems A and B of similar generations, even if A came out a couple of years before B, it's common that A can do things that B can't, as well as B can do things that A can't. Even if there's an overall technical superiority of A over B, it will still be agrued by fanboys that B is better than a because there's this little thing B can do and A can't. So I'm sure there's people that will call the Mega Drive having better graphics due to it's higher horizontal resolution.

It's like the C64 vs NES, it's pretty much the same thing, C64 has less sound channels but they can do more than NES' channels. It has worse graphics, BUT it can colour sprites individually among the 16 available colours instead of using the concept of a "sprite palette", and can colour individual BG tiles individually instead of using the concept of BG palettes and attribute tables.

[tokumaru]

I think the SNES has aged pretty poorly.

Not as poorly as the N64, but I tend to agree, a lot of mode 7 effects look like absolute crap these days.

[Drew Sebastino]

By far the ugliest thing to me is when a game that uses a BG for the status bar just displays black underneath it for Mode 7, rather than making it out of sprites here or just making sure it never reaches the status bar. It looks good in R-Type III because the status bar always has a black backdrop. I remember playing Super Castlevania IV and figuring out something was going to happen the second I got to the rotating room, which kind of ruined it.

[tokumaru]

By far the ugliest thing to me is when a game that uses a BG for the status bar just displays black underneath it for Mode 7

Oh, I noticed that in Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts! Didn't find it so bad. What really bothers me are the extreme mode 7 zooms, pixelated as fuck. The exaggerated use of gradients by artists who didn't know what to do with so many colors also irks me a lot. And of course, when the audio is so muffled it makes me feel like my head is inside a bucket.

[psycopathicteen]

If there's one company that always rubs me the wrong way it's Capcom, and here are the reasons:

-muffled samples
-excessive gradients
-stiff animation
-black bars
-lots of slowdown
-only 3 enemies at once

[ccovell]

-excessive gradients

No such thing.



It's all a matter of taste, this one.

[Drew Sebastino]

Oh, I noticed that in Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts! Didn't find it so bad.

It was at least consistent there. (The flickering title wave on the first level is ugly as shit though.) I still would have preferred it if the status bar blacked out everything and not just the layer it is on. I don't know why they did that; it makes no visual sense and it's not like its difficult to spot. (Nobody was ever tricked into thinking it was another BG.) If they absolutely needed to do that, for some reason, they could have used windowing and made the background under the scoreboard fade in. This doesn't make sense either, but I'm sure it would look better.

muffled samples

Audio quality aside, they also suck. Unlike just about every other company, I think their music actually got worse. I don't even think Street Fighter II SNES sounds that good (the arcade version is undoubtedly the best), but Super Street Fighter 2 SNES sounds terrible.

Yeah, some of the Mode 7 pixilation is annoying though. I wonder how much of the map F-Zero is displaying, because the closer the closest part is to native resolution, the better. Shrinking looks better than scaling, in my opinion. It's actually kind of nice that the Neo Geo can only shrink sprites, because artists can't draw something really small and blow it up for a 2.5D game.

No such thing.

Uh, yes or no? (The whole background is a gradient, but the tiles aren't very colorful)

[psycopathicteen]

Street Fighter Alpha is ridiculous. Every sample was ridiculously muffled but for somehow had to reload the music after the announcer said "fight". Also, you mean to tell me Capcom never swapped out spc700 codes before?

[93143]

I'm sorry; I just can't take this Mode 7 bashing seriously. Sure, it looks bad compared to what the Gamecube could do, and it could certainly be mishandled, but taking it as a reason for preferring the Mega Drive is redolent of sour grapes...

Agreed on SFA2. I believe it's mostly the voices that needed reloading (and took up a ton of ARAM once loaded), which implies that the game could have benefited massively from a fast on-demand audio streaming engine. We had a substantial discussion on this topic a while back; maybe once I get my Super FX bullet hell test running I'll put a little focus on my HDMA streaming scheme and see if it works.

[tokumaru]

I'm sorry; I just can't take this Mode 7 bashing seriously. Sure, it looks bad compared to what the Gamecube could do, and it could certainly be mishandled, but taking it as a reason for preferring the Mega Drive is redolent of sour grapes...

I don't think mode 7 was mentioned as a reason for preferring the MD, it was just a parallel discussion.

[93143]

I was referring mostly to pubby's post on the previous page, which was the point of entry for this subject and may thus be seen as providing context for the discussion. This does not imply that everybody agrees with the implication contained in his post, but so far nobody has said otherwise.

[Bregalad]

By far the ugliest thing to me is when a game that uses a BG for the status bar just displays black underneath it for Mode 7 [...] I remember playing Super Castlevania IV and figuring out something was going to happen the second I got to the rotating room, which kind of ruined it.

Huh ? How is that a problem ? Anyway after having played the game once you already "know" the rotating room is going to rotate so by your standards the experience is ruined systematically at each replay. I probably played SCV IV 50+ times so then my experience is even more ruined since I know every single thing about this game by heart. Finally, knowing "something is going to happen" but not knowing what is probably just as interesting, in the case where you're discovering the game for the 1st time.

Also doing this status bar with sprites (as you suggest) would make it as noticeable because they'd start to disappear as soon as another sprite would come in the same area, the SNES not being able to display more than 32 8x8 sprites per line (and larger sprites being internally converted to 8x8 sprites).

I'm sorry; I just can't take this Mode 7 bashing seriously.

It wasn't serious, there was a troll who came with some random insults and tokumaru answered him seriously (aka "feed the troll").

f there's one company that always rubs me the wrong way it's Capcom, and here are the reasons:

-muffled samples

Huh? Capcom came with what is highly reconized as some of the best music for the SNES for example in the Mega Man X series (but also Mega Man 7 and Mega Man & Bass), and the Breath of Fire bi-logy. You're probably the only weirdo calling that "muffled" or "horrible quality" or whatever.

The reason the audio in Street Fighter games is so bad is because they wanted to have voices, and the SPC700 is not suited for voices. In Steet FIghter II they simply had very low quality voices to take few memory (which does indeed sound "muffled" as you describe), and in Street Fighter Alpha they load them dynamically but it takes a hell of loading time and ruins the experience (which is IMO much worse than simply sounding "muffled"). I believe it would have been best to port those games without using voices at all, but that just isn't the path they took. Juding Capcom on those two games alone is ridiculous - let alone that Street Fighter Alpha doesn't even use Capcom's sound engine in the 1st place.

[Drew Sebastino]

Huh ? How is that a problem ?

Why ask the question and then argue against my statement, implying you knew exactly why I thought it was a problem?

I probably played SCV IV 50+ times so then my experience is even more ruined since I know every single thing about this game by heart.

Actually, kind of. If I were to play a non-multiplayer linear game 50+ times, the challenge is just about eliminated, making it no fun. The only time I do this sort of thing is if I set a challenge for myself, like never loosing a life, or something like that.

some of the best music for the SNES for example in the Mega Man X series

If that's truly the case (which I don't think it is), that's not good for the SNES. It's not that the composition is bad or anything, but I hate the sound samples, not due to quality, but because of how they sound.

The reason the audio in Street Fighter games is so bad is because they wanted to have voices, and the SPC700 is not suited for voices.

They could have streemed the voice samples with HDMA; I don't think that's asking too much. They'd probably be 12KHz or something like that, which is even an improvement for the voice samples.

[Bregalad]

Actually, kind of. If I were to play a non-multiplayer linear game 50+ times, the challenge is just about eliminated, making it no fun.

Actually, sadly you're right. I wish we could be allowed to forgot a game almost completely and re-discover it from scratch. In my case for SCV IV I know it way too well to have nearly as much pleasure playing it. That'd be amazing. Well perhaps an answer is to play other (new) games, but...

If that's truly the case (which I don't think it is), that's not good for the SNES. [...] I hate the sound samples, not due to quality, but because of how they sound.

Haters gonna hate...

They could have streemed the voice samples with HDMA; I don't think that's asking too much. They'd probably be 12KHz or something like that, which is even an improvement for the voice samples.

What you're asking for is abusing the system's hardware on the CPU side (use graphical hardware for sound) *and* having a dedicated special program on the SPC700 side able to receive this data. This is higly nonstandard, and we're talking about Street Fighter II, which came out almost straight after the system's release. I don't think they were supposed to push the system to it's limit at that point. Also, I don't think you can possibly pretend 12kHz audio isn't muffled. If you're talking about SFA2 then I agree with you, they were supposed to push the system to it's limit since it was at the end of its life.

[93143]

troll

See, that's what I thought, but then everybody started agreeing with him...

...wait, that means...

...dammit.

Street Fighter Alpha doesn't even use Capcom's sound engine in the 1st place.

What? Whose engine does it use?

They could have streemed the voice samples with HDMA; I don't think that's asking too much.

Depends on your definition of "too much". As far as I know, HDMA was never used to stream audio during the commercial lifetime of the system. Even Star Ocean doesn't do it.

abusing the system's hardware on the CPU side (use graphical hardware for sound)

Using HDMA to write to the APU ports is exactly the same as using it to write to any of the PPU registers.

I can see how the fact that it was obviously designed to do graphical effects could lead someone to subconsciously ignore it when designing an audio engine, and I can certainly see how someone slightly more creative could still end up deciding that the APU-side streaming code was too big a challenge for a game with a schedule and budget to meet. But it's not like the streaming in N-Warp Daisakusen shortens the lifespan of the chipset... also, it's possible the APU ports were put on the B bus for a reason - there are even four of them, matching the maximum capacity of an HDMA channel...

I agree that expecting HDMA streaming in Street Fighter 2 is unreasonable. I'm not even sure expecting it in Alpha 2 is reasonable; then again, considering the mess the audio loader made of that game, you'd think someone at Capcom might have started casting about for ideas on how to fix it...