nesdev.org

In [url=http://nesdev.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?p=60424#60424]this post[/url], Bregalad wrote:Well you'd have to be pretty dumb to confuse the sound coming out of the NES and the SNES.

I gotta say, you could intentionally design a SNES game that sounds like Lagrange Point and it wouldn't be too far out of place.

Well, maybe it sounds more like a Genesis game. Genesis had the weaker chip and didn't do MIDI.

Everyone says the SNES has better sound than the MD/Genesis but I find SNES sounds terribly muffled most of the time, like they're sampled at very low rates...

Note that I know precisely nothing about how the SNES generates sound (for all I know it could use sound sampled at low rates), that's just the impression I get.

The SNES did use sampled sounds for it's audio, the SPC is a wavetable chip. It does orchestral stuff a lot better than the Genesis, which just had an FM chip, which was a lot more bloopy.

tokumaru wrote:Everyone says the SNES has better sound than the MD/Genesis but I find SNES sounds terribly muffled most of the time, like they're sampled at very low rates...

Sounds like a made-up argument of a biased Saga fanboy who refuses to admit that the Super NES is like 10 times superior to his beloved Sega genesis in therms of graphics & sound (sorry couldn't resist...)

Okay some SNES games sounds bad this is a fact, but it's all their fault for using bad samples.

I prefer the bleepy bloopy sort-of-hollow-sounding music on the Genesis to the SNES's first foray into more realistic audio. Though that's not terribly on topic.

I think the GBA's sound mixer that almost all games used is horrible. Sample quality is terrible (Often as low as 5500Hz!!!), then it's mixed together at a low sampling rate.
Almost makes me wish that someone go replace the GSF format with a direct sappy player format. Say, convert them to IT files or something.

Almost makes me wish that someone go replace the GSF format with a direct sappy player format.

Couldn't agree more. They sound okay on a real GBA/DS but not good when emulated on my PC. I think about 95% of games uses the same sound driver, only the # of channels, the sample rate and stereo/mono changes.

Talking about that I made a java program to insert audio track from any game into any of the FF advance series (so you can use their cool visualizer for any GBA game that has the standard sound driver), it works but the drums are often too high pitched, because they aren't resampled, and the FF advances uses a sampling rate of ~18kHz which is higher than most games. However, only Golden Sun had them too low, probably because it uses an even higher sample rate.

I knew the GBA would have crappy sound the moment I read it was done in software. Nothing inherently wrong with software, but the fact that it's competing for CPU time that could be spent on the game means that sound will be on the losing end of that developer battle; especially for a portable system, developers don't care much about sound quality as compared to graphics or enemy complexity (or not having to optimize code as much).

You are probably right... but the fact that the DAC is 8-bit doesn't help either. 16-bits would be necessary for something sounding good.

Altough what I love with the GBA is the presence of GBC sound channels and the crazy amount of games which uses them a lot.

Bregalad wrote:Sounds like a made-up argument of a biased Saga fanboy who refuses to admit that the Super NES is like 10 times superior to his beloved Sega genesis in therms of graphics & sound (sorry couldn't resist...)

I hope you are not talking about me, because I'm by no means a fanboy of any kind. I like Nintendo and Sega 8 and 16-bit consoles pretty much equally, and I have my own perceptions of the differences between them.

I have to disagree that the SNES is obviously superior to the MD/Genesis in both sound and video, and in fact you are the one sounding like a fanboy.

The SNES does have more video features (colors, effects, and so on), but sometimes I think the extra horizontal resolution of the MD/Genesis makes a big difference. Same goes for sound. I'll take almost any Genesis game rather than a SNES game that that sounds like it's playing inside a bucket.

Bregalad wrote:Okay some SNES games sounds bad this is a fact, but it's all their fault for using bad samples.

The SPC700 and DSP share a 64 KiB RAM chip. Higher sample rates use more RAM and more ROM. Try making a .xm with multiple songs that fits in about 96 KiB,* and make sure cubic resampling is turned on in the player, and see if you don't have to downsample (and muffle) the samples to make them fit.

Sure, sound from the Yamaha FM chips in Lagrange Point, the Genesis, and the AdLib card for PCs has more high-frequency content. But like the 2A03 and any other pure synth, it sounds artificial, where every game ends up sounding like it uses the same instruments. There's a reason why PC MIDI playback moved on from AdLib to software-mixed PCM. Or would Genesis games sound better with a soundtrack by Phil Collins?

Oh, and GBA sound doesn't suck. Go play Luminesweeper (video, rom) and hear how good a software music player engine can be.


* Larger than 64 KiB because of BRR compression that cuts samples to 56% of 8-bit, but smaller than 113 KiB because of the playback engine, echo buffer, and the fact that phrase data doesn't pack as well as samples.

tokumaru wrote:I have to disagree that the SNES is obviously superior to the MD/Genesis in both sound and video, and in fact you are the one sounding like a fanboy.

- Care to proof it? I can mention a few games. The most obvious difference is Street Fighter: while the Genesis version brings more arcade fidelity, the sound is terrible, specially for voices. The graphics looks "missing" colors; the SNES palette is far more complete and gives a much better visual looking.

- Perhaps you're with Sonic games in mind? Well, the SNES has no Sonic game style AFAIK; I wouldn't say Speedy Gonzales is an exception though. Anyway, I won't extend it so far, but... Battletoads is another example, plus Battletoads & Double Dragon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zfUhWzmAIE (SF comparison)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk9rMm-K2vY (Mortal Kombat comparison, in spanish, err... a bit crap)

Pac-Attack's music sounds better on the Genesis than on the Super NES. (I've rented both.) In fact, the GBA version of Pac-Attack used samples recorded from a Genesis. Magazine reviews said the same thing about the title screen music in the different Beavis and Butt-head games on the two platforms: the Super NES game's music sounded thin.

But then, Disney's Pinocchio sounds far better on the Super NES, and so does Zoop.

Back to the NES: European-developed games using arpeggio push the 2A03, and Sunsoft bass pushes it further.

Which SNES bad do you have in mind who sounds so bad ? Some games play "steamed" sound effects at very low rates, it is true, and because they took so much space in memory they had few left for musical samples. This doesn't sound very good and is a bad usage of the hardware. But some games like Secret of Mana or Chrono Trigger has awesome sound effects and honnestly sounds at least 10 times better than what would be done on the Genesis with those FM instruments which are aggressive.

The SPC has a sampling rate of 32kHz which is almost CD quality, and use gaussian interpolation which remove all artifacts when playing samples at high frequencies. And I don't think the human hear can notice the difference between 32kHz and 44.1 kHz in most cases.

PS : Sunsoft's bass is another thing which is IMO over rated. It sounds "windy" to me.

(disclaimer: I am a sega hating ninty fanboy, ignoring the dreamcast, for it was awesome)

Square and Enix's SNES games are pretty much the pinnacle of pointing out why the genesis (and it's pathetic SMS-class audio) sucked. A slightly more equitable take would be that the SNES was good at orchestral stuff, the genesis at more techno stuff. When one or the other tried to cross over, the results almost invariably sucked.

Good FM and wavetable music sound pretty awesome. Bad FM music is an order of magnitude worse than bad wavetable.