SNES vs. Genesis audio

[blargg]

Such time-division multiplexing seems like a great way to reduce hardware cost. The only consequence I can see is harmonics at N times the sampling rate, where N is the number of channels. These will be filtered out by the low-pass anyway. The Namco sound chip uses the same scheme, with N variable based on the number of channels.

[tomaitheous]

The sample playback hardware in the Apple IIGS did the same thing.

Heh, that's interesting. The addon sound card, or the built on one? I remember something about one of the Apple II models having a wavetable card. Is this the one you're talking about? (Sorry, I don't know my Apple II specs/history very much)

Such time-division multiplexing seems like a great way to reduce hardware cost. The only consequence I can see is harmonics at N times the sampling rate, where N is the number of channels. These will be filtered out by the low-pass anyway. The Namco sound chip uses the same scheme, with N variable based on the number of channels.

Even without a low pass filter, the speakers are going to act as a low pass filter themselves, no? Even high end speakers seem to have a drop off at around 20-25khz frequency response (and I have no idea at what power that's rated at - max negative to max positive amplitude response time. Probably something pretty small in difference).

IIRC, TmEE runs his Genesis systems with a faster amp and put the cut off pretty high. I think he mentioned it sounds fine on his speakers and headphones, but capturing the audio with a normal 44khz 16bit sound card led to artifacts in the recording.

[tepples]

The sample playback hardware in the Apple IIGS did the same thing.

Heh, that's interesting. The addon sound card, or the built on one?

The Ensoniq on the motherboard. It's all spelled out in the Apple IIGS Hardware Reference.

[ccovell]

Listening back to a lot of SNES music, is seems clear to me that it (SPC) wasn't really pushed to its potential much, other than square's soft orchestral stuff. Yuko Koshiro is often cited for Genesis music, but his music for Super Adventure Island is awesome on the SNES. Shame he didn't get more involved with the sound chip (he didn't even write the music engine for that game, which he normally did on other systems). A lot of SNES games sounded like they uses stock samples of a dev kit.

Very true. I've been in a SNES phase recently and while some Japanese companies experimented a bit, too many of them used the stock sound driver and samples. Why don't we list here some games that actually went the extra mile to make great music, with great-sounding instruments (so that eliminates several Square/Enix games right away), on the SNES?

I'll start with Equinox (forgetting about the title and ending music for now) and ActRaiser, of course.

[Dwedit]

Didn't ActRaiser use the stock instruments?

[ccovell]

Naah, the stock ones are what you'd hear in a Bandai game like The Great Battle.

[BMF54123]

A few of my favorites:

Donkey Kong Country 2: WOW. The sheer variety of sounds in this soundtrack is amazing. Dave Wise and the Rare programmers are geniuses.
Jurassic Park: bad game, good soundtrack. "Raptor Rap" is probably my favorite; I love the drums and the jungle ambience in the background.
Super Adventure Island: probably one of Yuzo Koshiro's best 16-bit works. Too bad it's pretty short.
Super Castlevania IV: this one seems to use a couple of stock instruments, but otherwise it's a fantastic soundtrack, especially considering how old it is (1991). I love the piano sample used in "Chandeliers."
Super Bonk: the instruments aren't particularly noteworthy, but overall it's a really high-quality soundtrack with a ton of character.

[Bregalad]

You'll have to explain me what is a "stock sample" so I can answer this question.

Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean probably pushed the SPC700 to it's limit being able to play multiple voice/streamed sound effect at the same time, the musical instruments sounds good (although identical in both games) and there is no "freeze" when a new music or sound effect is playing like there is in most other SNES games (as the main CPU is busy sending data to the SPC), this is very noticeable in Chrono Trigger at the start and end of each battle.

Tactics Ogre sounds really orchestral to me, it really sounds better than most SNES games.

[mic_]

Just a few I can think of right now (in terms of good compositions - some of the instruments may still be questionable):

Pinball Fantasies
Parodius Da!
Gokujou Parodius
Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts
Wild Guns

[mic_]

You'll have to explain me what is a "stock sample" so I can answer this question.

Samples that they were given as part of a dev kit, or got from some common source (maybe the sample bank in some digital synth).
I would explain it as samples that sound like they were taken from the General MIDI sample set on a Windows PC.. Very generic stuff, like "here we have a 'grand piano', it sounds exactly the same as the grand piano in 20 other games".
I always felt the instruments in Megaman X fell into that category. But the compositions are so darn good that I can't _not_ like the music

[Bregalad]

Mmmh and where else would you get samples ?

You sure can create your own but only for very simplistic sounds that don't sound like an instrument. Chrono Trigger does something cool with a sample that is square wave with the duty cycle changing dynamically (it's instrument #16, used in a few songs and sound effects).

[TmEE]

Muffledness of SNES stuff is what bothers me the most... I wish reas SNES could sound like emulation where sample rate is set high and all interpolation and filtering is turned off so the sound becomes crisp. The output sample rate is high enough for somewhat crisp sound but the interpolation nulls all there could have been.
The simple 8ch sampler in MegaCD has no interpolation whatsoever and very close sample rate to SNES, I lifted the fitering point well above 20KHz and damn the sound became ultra crisp, pleasure to listen to. Unfortunately it did not happen on SNES when I did that

SNES and other sample based setups are easier to work on, on some aspects... you don't have to create instreuments from ~50 parameters like you do on FM, you just use a recording of some.. drawback is that you only got limited amount of memory to hold the samples and you need to share it with the sound engine, music data and sound effects data aswell not just samples needed for music itself... Synthesizer will be better on that part since an instrument will take negligable amoun of space, wether its crappy or good it will take same amount of space... now how good the isntrument will be is greatly dependant on the composer... FM is rather difficult to get around to and its very overwhelming in the beginning. It will take quite a lot of time before you actually understand what all of the parameters do, and when you can think about "today I'll make a flute" and you go and make it...

Some comments about the crappy sample playback on MD : this is all about the quality of the code that handles sound... MD does not give you any high enough percision timers that generate interrupts, there's no FIFO on the DAC channel nor any other features... just a DAC which is completely software driven. YM offers you 2x timers, but neither is wired to the interrupt, only VBL is but that is useless for sound. From my experience though, I just cannot understand how could 99% of the single PCM channel music drivers have so crappy sample playback... I would understand it if it was 2 or more channels because the banking mechanism on Z80 side is truly horrible and slow....

MD does offer much more freedom on the sound area though, the Z80 has more or less full access to the rest of the system, only thing you hold in RAM is the sound playback code and perhaps some related data, all else you can access directly from the ROM. That is how I manage ~450KB of samples that any of the tunes can use at any time in my sound system. On SNES you have these slow ports and you have to involve both sides into getting data in and out from either side... not so on MD, one side can run totally independently from other, only problem is communications... because of a timing problem, reads and writes to 68K RAM from Z80 are ineffective so for comms the 68K has to stop Z80 and read/write values from/to its RAM. That will have some negative effect on sample playback quality, but this is something you do not do very often so the effect is minimal.

Here's few recordings from MegaCD (sound mod inside MegaCD, going to my MD2 and through Crystal Clear Audio Mod in the MD2) :
http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/4/21/ ... CDPCM3.ogg
http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/4/21/ ... CDPCM0.ogg
http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/4/21/ ... EDBGM0.ogg
http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/4/21/ ... NGAME0.ogg
MegaCD has one advantage, which is that in that 64KB of RAM sound PCM chip, you do not have to store music playback code, but the samples are all uncompressed... but things sound rather good. None of the recordings there have been processed in any way, just direct recordings.
The Silpheed recordings have YM and PSG in the mix also. I'd like SNES to sound that crisp.....

Here's couple of pure MD stuff, from my sound engine and my MD2 sound mod :
http://8bitcollective.com/music/TmEE/One+Last+Step/
http://8bitcollective.com/music/TmEE/Guile+Theme/
http://8bitcollective.com/music/TmEE/Ev ... ound+(MD)/

I kinda doubt anyone listens any of those recordings though ^^

[mic_]

Mmmh and where else would you get samples ?

You sure can create your own but only for very simplistic sounds that don't sound like an instrument.

There's nothing saying you can't sample real instruments if you've got the right equipment.
But I wasn't saying that there is anything wrong with using samples created by other people. The problem I see is when a lot of games use the same (or very similar) samples, which sometimes also are of poor quality. Some games didn't make much of an effort to make their music distinct from a lot of other games, which gets boring in the long run.

[Hojo_Norem]

Muffledness of SNES stuff is what bothers me the most... I wish reas SNES could sound like emulation where sample rate is set high and all interpolation and filtering is turned off so the sound becomes crisp. The output sample rate is high enough for somewhat crisp sound but the interpolation nulls all there could have been.
The simple 8ch sampler in MegaCD has no interpolation whatsoever and very close sample rate to SNES, I lifted the fitering point well above 20KHz and damn the sound became ultra crisp, pleasure to listen to. Unfortunately it did not happen on SNES when I did that

IMO, the post DAC hardware in the SNES isn't the best. There is a relatively simple mod (compared to some other mods I have seen) for the SNES to output a digital S/PDIF signal. Can't get any cleaner than that. I'l try and get some recordings done if anybody's interested.

SNES and other sample based setups are easier to work on, on some aspects... you don't have to create instreuments from ~50 parameters like you do on FM, you just use a recording of some.. drawback is that you only got limited amount of memory to hold the samples and you need to share it with the sound engine, music data and sound effects data aswell not just samples needed for music itself...

From what I have seen while my idle browsing through the C64 HVSC, on average the entirety of a games audio is stored in ~8Kb at any one time. Thats driver, music, instruments and sometimes even SFX routines. I dare say that similar music drivers on the SPC700 take about the same space and considering the BRR compression the DSP uses for it's sample data there is a decent amount a space left for sample data. And let's not forget that it is just as easy to bend samples to one's will as it is a FM synth (eg, The entirety of the cast in Starfox is made from the one "Wing Damaged" sample)

Here's few recordings from MegaCD (sound mod inside MegaCD, going to my MD2 and through Crystal Clear Audio Mod in the MD2) :
http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/4/21/ ... CDPCM3.ogg
http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/4/21/ ... CDPCM0.ogg
http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/4/21/ ... EDBGM0.ogg
http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/4/21/ ... NGAME0.ogg
MegaCD has one advantage, which is that in that 64KB of RAM sound PCM chip, you do not have to store music playback code, but the samples are all uncompressed... but things sound rather good. None of the recordings there have been processed in any way, just direct recordings.
The Silpheed recordings have YM and PSG in the mix also. I'd like SNES to sound that crisp.....

They don't sound to bad but theres too much aliasing (is that the right word?). The Amiga potentially has far superior PCM capabilities compared to the MegaCD (not accounting for raw storage space), but nearly all Amiga music I listen to has the machine's internal audio filter turned ON to avoid what I hear in your recordings which sound crisp yes, but IMO, not as clean as I prefer.

[Disch]

(eg, The entirety of the cast in Starfox is made from the one "Wing Damaged" sample)

That's a freaking awesome bit of trivia.

So I guess Falco is really saying "wing wing wing damage" and not "bwe bwe bwe jammin" like I always imagined.