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SNES vs Genesis Sound

georaldc said:
The song past 11:30 literally sounds like a Streets of Rage track. The next one too
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It sounds like a Yuzo Koshiro soundtrack but Yuzo Koshiro doesn't sound right without that FM synthesis. He even made the Etrian Odyssey soundtrack on a PC88 so that he could get that sound.

Edit: Actually, this soundtrack is a good example of why the Genesis was better.
 
EPSYLON EAGLE said:
News sound drivers allow 4 simultaneous PCM channels for Genesis and some stunning stuff is now avaliable for future homebrews.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdL8fJH2mic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Irng8PTEws&t=66s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P--NG7IIxcs&t=354s
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What sorcery is this!? Are there more examples of this? Information about how was this pulled off? (Even though I won't understand an iota of the technical details) I've searched google and youtube but I don't get anywhere.
 
1st track is I think just PCM playback, someone correct me if I wrong. It's like playing a WAV. The impressive part is that it sounds so clear. I figure the rom size is pretty big.
 
jett said:
1st track is I think just PCM playback, someone correct me if I wrong. It's like playing a WAV. The impressive part is that it sounds so clear. I figure the rom size is pretty big.
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It was a 4MB bin file when I downloaded it. So that makes it (at most) 32mbit?

Which I think is the size of SSF2.

But a safer guess would be that it's using PCM, but has very small loops of samples and just plays them in certain order. Might not take up that much at all.
 
Kinda surprised you guys haven't heard or played that hack yet. I probably should've posted the music in here already but it didn't occur to me.

Wonko_C said:
What sorcery is this!? Are there more examples of this? Information about how was this pulled off? (Even though I won't understand an iota of the technical details) I've searched google and youtube but I don't get anywhere.
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The pcm tracks were sequenced in a tracker based on a custom sound driver that probably outputs native files for the genesis specifically. The rest are smps based, which I believe means they were written in hex.
Well, transcribed or translated might be more accurate.
 
dogen said:
Kinda surprised you guys haven't heard or played that hack yet. I probably should've posted the music in here already but it didn't occur to me.



The pcm tracks were sequenced in a tracker based on a custom sound driver that probably outputs native files for the genesis specifically. The rest are smps based, which I believe means they were written in hex.
Well, transcribed or translated might be more accurate.
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I hadn't played it. I have now...on my Everdrive.

That is pretty impressive.
 
EPSYLON EAGLE said:
Very much solid OST for a 1990 game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1YnuVJ8mqI&index=8&list=PL6E708C05296FEDE5

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1K-swt1c2k&index=18&list=PL6E708C05296FEDE5

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HZn6GdZGCQ&index=17&list=PL6E708C05296FEDE5
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I'd never heard about this game before, and decided to check it out. It's a weird, early 3D RPG/FPS/flight simulator. It's kinda weird. It was only released in Japan, but fans recently translated the game into English:

http://www.romhacking.net/translations/2776/
 
EPSYLON EAGLE said:
News sound drivers allow 4 simultaneous PCM channels for Genesis and some stunning stuff is now avaliable for future homebrews.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdL8fJH2mic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Irng8PTEws&t=66s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P--NG7IIxcs&t=354s
Click to expand...

Whoa!! Dat first and third track. If only this happened during the prime of the Megadrive's life. It would have made everything SNES fanboy owner freak out along with the industry as a whole.

I wonder if any updated driver was done for the graphics chip to push it to blasphemy heights?
 
EPSYLON EAGLE said:
News sound drivers allow 4 simultaneous PCM channels for Genesis and some stunning stuff is now avaliable for future homebrews.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdL8fJH2mic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Irng8PTEws&t=66s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P--NG7IIxcs&t=354s
Click to expand...


Some really exciting compositions, but based on some of the reactions I expected the technical breakthrough to translate to more of a revelatory result. It's good, really impressive in parts, but I've heard games not even using this updated driver sound more impressive to me, across SNES and Genesis both.

Just my dumb opinion.

I do have a question about it though, is there any kind of CPU hit (or one that hits harder) that would make maintaining visual performance something not feasible? Basically if Sonic 2 was recomposed and made to use this new driver, would the game performance not be affected?
 
Inuhanyou said:
I never understood the hate for the Genesis chipset at all, when talented people were behind the wheel, it really matched up to SNES's output IMO, and even surpassed it in many instances


Adventures of Batman and Robin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olfqivw3858

Mortal Kombat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwAHU2zsgM0

Power Rangers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOUqMuQ8vi0

Contra Hard Corps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYNLz8goZdE
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You can understand the hate when you realize that a lot of the bad examples landed on big name multiplat games, giving the whole hardware an unfair shake. People associated that FM synth sound with chip tunes and being out of date.
 
Inuhanyou said:
I never understood the hate for the Genesis chipset at all, when talented people were behind the wheel, it really matched up to SNES's output IMO, and even surpassed it in many instances
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Yeah, the idea that people get in their head that it's some trash garbage chip is kind of weird to me too.

Especially when they say stuff like sonic and streets of rage being the only good music on the system. Obviously that's not true, but if the chip is so bad... how could it produce something that sounds as good as those games anyway lol?


Btw, here's a pretty cool track from a game that hasn't been mentioned here yet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKw2kDIlU0M
 
I have been experimenting with the YM2612's extended channel 3 mode this week figuring out new ways to use it. You can separate each operator into its own independant (mostly. You can't pan them separately) sub channel, and using a specific algorithm you can turn it into 4 different sine wave channels. At first I didn't think using 4 sines would be all that valuable in practice, but it turns out it actually works quite well for psytrance and similar kinds of music. I use 1 sine with pitch-bending to create a kick drum, and on one of them I can use the feedback parameter to turn the sine into a de-facto saw wave, which works great as a bass. I even discovered that due to the way the amplitude synergizes with the feedback, by playing around with the volume you can essentially use it as a de-facto lp filter. And then you have 2 sine channels remaining you can do whatever with. Threw together a short loop in Deflemask as a proof of concept.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/66640537/psytest5.vgm

So that's using channel 3 for bass, kick, some sine wave octaves and an echo with some rythmic volume gating for those sines, then 2 channels for the gated synth and another for some basic FM percussion. That still leaves 2 FM channels unused along with the PSG channels as well, so this is using just 4 channels out of 12/13 with the channel 3 extension. I don't think anyone has thought of using it in this manner before, so this is pretty groundbreaking stuff.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/66640537/psytest5mute.vgm

Here it is with only channel 3 playing so you can hear everything I fit into what amounts to a single channel.

kinggroin said:
I do have a question about it though, is there any kind of CPU hit (or one that hits harder) that would make maintaining visual performance something not feasible? Basically if Sonic 2 was recomposed and made to use this new driver, would the game performance not be affected?
Click to expand...

Those tracks are used in a ROM hack which shows that they work entirely fine in a full gameplay context, and that's even with some upgrades on the graphical front.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xln0a0HIX5Y
 
Its just a shame that Sega coudn't replicate the success they had with the genesis with the Saturn and Dreamcast....instead they decided to self-destruct...
 
RAIDEN1 said:
Its just a shame that Sega coudn't replicate the success they had with the genesis with the Saturn and Dreamcast....instead they decided to self-destruct...
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Saturn was pretty successful in Japan (unlike the Genesis), even ahead of the Playstation for a long time.

Sega's fall was more a result of Sega USA and Japan doing some stupid things to each other.
 
dogen said:
Yeah, the idea that people get in their head that it's some trash garbage chip is kind of weird to me too.

Especially when they say stuff like sonic and streets of rage being the only good music on the system. Obviously that's not true, but if the chip is so bad... how could it produce something that sounds as good as those games anyway lol?
Click to expand...

kinggroin said:
You can understand the hate when you realize that a lot of the bad examples landed on big name multiplat games, giving the whole hardware an unfair shake. People associated that FM synth sound with chip tunes and being out of date.
Click to expand...


My frustration lies more with there actually being SO many old games with great soundtracks on Genesis for me, its almost more like just outright slander. maybe in direct comparison with SNES's chip trying to emulate a better sound source like arcade or PC it showed its weaknesses a lot more compared to SNES which was more equipped to deal with directly synthesizing those tunes, but in general it held its own quite well compared to SNES itself.

Games like Vectorman, Revenge of Shinobi, Shinobi 3 and other games mentioned here.
 
Yep, that's damn fine work gecko!

From my limited understanding, much of the...troubles...would be served had the 32X been properly utilized alone as a comfortable stronger genesis-like(genesis+) solution space, let alone until the Saturn era of much more potent FM Synth and general all purpose capabilities that graduated it unto another esoteric beast entirely.

I think delek's been suggested cracking the code on 32X same as Aly James and the few other folks, Plogue/etc as a worthy leg of the journey to the end of the Synth Chip road as we know it in the Saturn----but as always, time will tell as the Genesis AND all the relative Arcade/etc FM chipsets and whatnot get fully situated at long last even here at the sort of bleeding edge of chaos surprises coming up like lazygecko's work above.

Never been a better time for FM to gain ground, even if a fair bit of that is locked behind archaeological esoterica...

Also, another fine cheat of an example, because like the prior it is just too damn good a glimpse of where the horizons could reach If Only: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9tUpSgjZm4
 
This DKC2 music thread got me thinking. Did SNES music tracks, or at least the instrument samples used, sound better before they were stripped down and constrained for the limitations of the SPC700/S-DSP and cart storage sizes?

I'm basically wondering if Nintendo is sitting on CD audio quality soundtracks for many of its games, which could have theoretically been used on SNES CD re-releases of those games.
 
grew up on genesis to some incredible music on sonic 1 & 2, mega turrican, vectorman.

but from the snes games ive played, they have incredible sound.
 
Mega said:
This DKC2 music thread got me thinking. Did SNES music tracks, or at least the instrument samples used, sound better before they were stripped down and constrained for the limitations of the SPC700/S-DSP and cart storage sizes?

I'm basically wondering if Nintendo is sitting on CD audio quality soundtracks for many of its games, which could have theoretically been used on SNES CD re-releases of those games.
Click to expand...

I own the Final Fantasy VI CD soundtrack and it sounds the same. I figure the samples are made to spec, taking the SNES's limitations into consideration.

The real constraint in relation to CD releases is that the SNES only outputs at 32khz.
 
Mega said:
[URL=" DKC2 music thread[/URL] got me thinking. Did SNES music tracks, or at least the instrument samples used, sound better before they were stripped down and constrained for the limitations of the SPC700/S-DSP and cart storage sizes?

I'm basically wondering if Nintendo is sitting on CD audio quality soundtracks for many of its games, which could have theoretically been used on SNES CD re-releases of those games.
Click to expand...

Probably, but I'm sure the "bit rate reduction" compression method adds some character to the sound.

I mean most games could only use 64kB of sound samples per song.
 
dogen said:
Probably, but I'm sure the "bit rate reduction" compression method adds some character to the sound.

I mean most games could only use 64kB of sound samples per song.
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This has much, much less to do with the compression in itself (it does alter the intricacies of the waveforms a bit but in the grand scope of things it remains pretty negligible in how things end up sounding) and more to do with how the length of the samples are trimmed down.
 
lazygecko said:
This has much, much less to do with the compression in itself (it does alter the intricacies of the waveforms a bit but in the grand scope of things it remains pretty negligible in how things end up sounding) and more to do with how the length of the samples are trimmed down.
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Yeah, you're probably right, but I'm sure it makes some difference even if it's really small..

https://youtu.be/l-VfFzOQRDk?t=89

Idk, this just kinda sounds duller.. I guess that could be considered character lol
 
Neither one is "better", they both have their pros and cons. Like the SNES was far superior in how it could manipulate samples, but sounded nowhere NEAR as punchy. The thing had zero dynamic range to it. The only samples the Genesis usually used were for drums and voices, but those drum sounds hit way harder than anything the SNES could do. Genesis was great with synthesizer stuff, and anyone who tried to approximate compositions made for the SNES usually made them sound bad. But if they embraced the Genesis's synth foundation and composed specifically for it, they would get great results like the aforementioned Earthworm Jim.
 
I used to own both SNES and Genesis and I have really tried to like Genesis sound and music. But compared to the SNES's music and especially sound effects, it's just so bad.

They both have their distinct sound/style, and sometimes there are some great tracks for sure, but 90% of the time, Genesis music sounds like I'm listening to a ham radio being raped by a farting robot through a tin can telephone.
 
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