Digital Foundry Retro Discussion [2016 - 2017]

[milk]

The Megadrive sound was quite odd...to me there were two types of sounds in the Megadrive. The music, which sounded a lot more synthetic than on the SNES, but fine and quite nice in some games, and the digitalised voices (which were a thing) and sounds, which to me sounded very mediocre. It is as if the Megadrive had 2 different sound chips.
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That's exactly how the mega drive was. It had 8 FM synthesized voices, and one voice for sampling digital sounds, which was very limited. The SNES in comparison simply had 8 voices for digital samples, so it was more versatile in the timbres you could get out of each voice, but they were constrained by the compression. Ironically, a lot of games were using very synthy samples on the snes, partly because they were popular back then, and partly because they were cheap to produce.

 

[function]

It did have 2 sound chips. One similar to what was in arcades at the time, and one from the master system.

And yeah the voices weren't great in SF2, but they could've been better. One guy went in and replaced the pcm playback code, and you can download a rom hack for it now. Actually, another person made a color hack too, that makes it look more like the arcade.

Here's a video of both hacks.

I've come across comparisons of the two SSF2 sound drivers before. It's amazing just how much better then ninja homebrew one was.

At the time, the low quality samples were put down to multiplexing the single sample channel. But it turns out that how well that was done was a big part of it ....

 

[function]

I really love this video, think I might have posted it before in the MD vs SNES audio thread (where MD won, obviously )

 

[Cyan]

I really love this video, think I might have posted it before in the MD vs SNES audio thread (where MD won, obviously )

Top Gear is a tough call, in fact I'd say that the SNES version sounds better. Played that game a lot! My favourite car was the fuchsia one, although the white car was the best for beginners.

As for other games, Ken's stage still sounds better to me on the SNES also.

Super Mario World, on the other hand, and F-Zero (one of my favourite games ever) sound really good in the video, I'd say better than the SNES version. Never played Final Fantasy V --in fact I barely FF franchise at all. Corneria music from Starfox is also quite decent. Part II looks promising, the sound of the Castlevania game is good.

Additionaly, one of the MIDIs in the 2nd video is from Teck, that guy has created some great game MIDIs.

It did have 2 sound chips. One similar to what was in arcades at the time, and one from the master system.

And yeah the voices weren't great in SF2, but they could've been better. One guy went in and replaced the pcm playback code, and you can download a rom hack for it now. Actually, another person made a color hack too, that makes it look more like the arcade.

Here's a video of both hacks.

Mega Turrican is a an example of good pcm playback. It even does multiple PCM samples at once without tripping over itself like street fighter. Ace soundtrack overall too.

gotta add that rom to my Launchbox frontend for retro games.​

 

[dogen]

I really love this video, think I might have posted it before in the MD vs SNES audio thread (where MD won, obviously )

Hope you know that's just a soundfont. Fun video though.

That's exactly how the mega drive was. It had 8 FM synthesized voices, and one voice for sampling digital sounds, which was very limited.

Man, I wish it was 8 channels, it's actually only 6, plus the 4 in the psg. You could do a lot more with just 2 extra. Heck, even just a dedicated pcm channel would have been nice (especially if sega didn't botch it.. oh well).

 

[milk]

Oh, thanks for the correction.

 

[Arwin]

This just ends up reminding me how much I loved the Lotus Esprit turbo challenge games (2 and 3 iirc).

EDIT: and also how badly racing games age generally ....

 

[Cyan]

This just ends up reminding me how much I loved the Lotus Esprit turbo challenge games (2 and 3 iirc).

EDIT: and also how badly racing games age generally ....

wowwwww,that game resembles me so much of one of the most anticipated games in my life, Top Gear 2 on the SNES. Ironically enough I never played it on a real SNES 'cos I didnt have it, but a friend did, however he never purchased the game.

The art is about the same as Top Gear 2. I loved Top Gear 1 and when Top Gear 2 was announced I was sooooo hyped. I remember reading the console magazines at the time and studying every single screenshot in the paper magazine. I imagined the tunnels in the first stage -Australia, afaik-, and thought to myself "How cool has to be to pass under that tunnel there??? I want this game!!". I studied not only the screenshot and the little I could glimpse of the tracks from them, but the backgrounds, the UI.., everything.

The only thing that dissapointed me a little from what I read about the game and the screengrabs, is that it was always the same car, which you could tune -contrary to Top Gear 1-, but I preferred the Top Gear 1 approach of having 4 car models, without the tuning part. Nice music, btw, it seems like the Amiga being a dedicated hardware had some advantages compared to the x86 PCs of the time.