Final Fantasy VI SPC playback missing an instrument

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Bregalad
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Re: Final Fantasy VI SPC playback missing an instrument

Post by Bregalad »

Step 1 for you should be to demonstrate that it exists. Find a recording. Find a SNES and make a recording. Even just finding a second person who remembers the same thing would be a start.
I agree. I'm pretty sure he's the troll and that everything's been made up by him.

What however could have been possible is that there was at some point some bug, which added garbage to one of the legitimately used sample when this song played, and this ended up sounding like a "clap". I am still highly doubtful.
tcaudilllg
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Re: Final Fantasy VI SPC playback missing an instrument

Post by tcaudilllg »

Bregalad wrote:
Step 1 for you should be to demonstrate that it exists. Find a recording. Find a SNES and make a recording. Even just finding a second person who remembers the same thing would be a start.
I agree. I'm pretty sure he's the troll and that everything's been made up by him.

What however could have been possible is that there was at some point some bug, which added garbage to one of the legitimately used sample when this song played, and this ended up sounding like a "clap". I am still highly doubtful.
Did you listen to the song from your CD? The sample is in the ROM; moreover, it was reused in FFVII (Shinra Company "broom sweep" fx). The sweeping sound is what's --missing-- from the emulated playback.
Shonumi
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Re: Final Fantasy VI SPC playback missing an instrument

Post by Shonumi »

If there is sound missing from emulated output, I think this would be of great importance to byuu, the author of higan. Emulation accuracy is serious business after all. Maybe get his attention to see why this sound isn't emulated, assuming it's played on real hardware. There might be something interesting we can all learn if this behavior of the SPC, whatever is it, were debugged thoroughly.
Revenant
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Re: Final Fantasy VI SPC playback missing an instrument

Post by Revenant »

tcaudilllg wrote:The sample in question isn't in the SPC at all
If the sample isn't in SPC memory when the song is playing, then it is simply not supposed to be part of the song. SNES sound drivers (including the multiple ones used by Square) tend to load all of a song's samples at once before starting playback, and if that fails somehow, it's less than likely that you're going to somehow end up with a song that plays back almost 100% perfectly except for a single sample.

Common sense (and experience) suggests that if this specific song had issues under emulation, other parts of the same soundtrack probably would too, and if one of the most well-known soundtracks in the entire SNES library had noticeable issues in apparently every single SNES audio emulator that exists, shouldn't someone else have noticed by now?
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Bregalad
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Re: Final Fantasy VI SPC playback missing an instrument

Post by Bregalad »

Did you listen to the song from your CD? The sample is in the ROM; moreover, it was reused in FFVII (Shinra Company "broom sweep" fx). The sweeping sound is what's --missing-- from the emulated playback.
Once again (and if you don't change your attitude it's my last post in this thread), you claim that there is a bug somewhere so first of all you should come with a proof. Either your or someone else's recording, or anything. Without that, your claim is empty and false, and there is no bug in neither SPC players nor SNES emulators when it comes to emulating sound in Final Fantasy VI.

Just saying "I remember" and using text descriptions of sounds you remember - which is a terrible way to do it - do not make any sense..
tcaudilllg
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Re: Final Fantasy VI SPC playback missing an instrument

Post by tcaudilllg »

Bregalad wrote:
Did you listen to the song from your CD? The sample is in the ROM; moreover, it was reused in FFVII (Shinra Company "broom sweep" fx). The sweeping sound is what's --missing-- from the emulated playback.
Once again (and if you don't change your attitude it's my last post in this thread), you claim that there is a bug somewhere so first of all you should come with a proof. Either your or someone else's recording, or anything. Without that, your claim is empty and false, and there is no bug in neither SPC players nor SNES emulators when it comes to emulating sound in Final Fantasy VI.

Just saying "I remember" and using text descriptions of sounds you remember - which is a terrible way to do it - do not make any sense..
Bregalad the only thing you have to contribute to the topic at hand is confirmation of the playback on the official OST, so if you're not going to listen to the song from the CD you say you have....

So far no one has offered conclusive evidence that the sample in question doesn't play during the song. The first video cited was a forgery... this can be ascertained thus:
- the shape of the screen seen in the video suggests that video was not taken from a CRT, but from an LCD display. It's noticeably rectangular... this was very uncommon on CRT TVs, which all had a much more regular shape per the limitations of the tech. While S-video might indeed have been an option for recording, there's the issue that the output of SDTV to a monitor is a straight 640x480 pixels (and has been since the Windows 3.x days). I remember in the days before emulation there were no more than eight or nine screenshots of FFVI in existence, and they were all 640x480 pixels in size.
- despite the snow-free, highly pixelized output of LCDs, there are signs of scanlines and (very poor and unconvincing) interpolation. Moreover, the artifacts seen and the screen dimensions observed are all identical to those produced by Higan and Retroarch with shaders enabled (they are, in fact, distinctive to these emulators as their presets force the uneven scaling of the image to exactly this shape).

So that vid's out the window, nor are there any other such video claims on Youtube now surviving.
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koitsu
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Re: Final Fantasy VI SPC playback missing an instrument

Post by koitsu »

tcaudilllg wrote:Bregalad the only thing you have to contribute to the topic at hand is confirmation of the playback on the official OST, so if you're not going to listen to the song from the CD you say you have....

So far no one has offered conclusive evidence that the sample in question doesn't play during the song.
Your reply begs the question. The replies to you in this thread so far have contained actual referenced evidence on multiple occasions, by several people here with good ears (myself included), including one who analyses game sound engines and fixes actual bugs. We're all asking you to provide definitive proof. A response of "oh yeah? well prove I'm lying" does not change the situation (and by definition, this does border on trollish behaviour). May I politely remind you that you chose to post here with a blanket statement, inducing the discussion at hand -- and so far the proof you've provided amounts to the following:

* You "remember" it having a hand clap, therefore certainly there was one, because "it is not a false memory" (rainwarrior even gives a supportive example of incorrect remembrance through lyrics of a Police song; I have similar stories myself, both with lyrics and with music -- a common one today is a result of the cowbell SNL sketch (yes, there really IS a cowbell in the background of Don't Fear the Reaper))
* MIDI files from the 90s, where everyone and their dog was doing remixes of video game music (see: OverClocked ReMix), often badly done (missing notes were common, or people who had difficulty discerning layers of notes/music), and choice of instruments were especially limited (read up on how the MIDI file format works)
* Some blathering about OSTs and low-pass filters (which was rebutted by at least one user who does own the CDs/OSTs -- keep reading)
* Extracting BRR data from a ROM file to find evidence of a hand clap, which Revenant explained politely why is faulty logic (re: how audio engines using the SPC700 are often designed, vs. your unfamiliarity with them)

Bregalad already stated "I own the official CDs, and they sound 100% identical to a modern SPC player or SNES emulator" which means he's listened to them, and refers to the source material which you earlier stated has the hand clap sound in it. Your rebuttal to him was "well then I will find someone else with the CDs", which starts to border on conspiracy-theory-ish (respectfully). In other words: you're going to continue this crusade until you find someone who supports you, and then somehow that will act as your evidence (this isn't how technical science works, I'm afraid).

So, rather than all this hullabaloo, why not kill two birds with one stone: do what was asked of you once already: make recordings yourself from the actual SNES/SFC and put them up somewhere. If there is some odd emulation bug/quirk, then this will act as definitive evidence for byuu (bsnes/higan author) to investigate further and maybe determine the root cause. That's a win-win for you either way: if it pans out, awesome; if not, then we welcome you to what old age feels like. :-)

What say you?
Last edited by koitsu on Mon Sep 26, 2016 7:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
niconii
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Re: Final Fantasy VI SPC playback missing an instrument

Post by niconii »

tcaudilllg, it's not really our responsibility to go to a great deal of effort to disprove your claim. Rather, because your claim is so extraordinary, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate conclusive evidence that this sample does in fact play in that song on real hardware.

Moreover, your reasons for dismissing the first video do not actually hold water:
  • Whether the TV was a CRT or LCD has nothing to do with the actual video signal, which would be recorded the same regardless of what TV happened to be used. Signals aren't recorded through the TV, nor are they affected by the type of TV used. They are recorded alongside the TV generally, directly from the console itself.
  • The resolution of the video also is irrelevant; even if the recorded video had to be 640x480 as you say (and I don't believe this is true with modern capture cards) it was most likely downscaled to be uploaded to YouTube.
  • I do not see signs of scanlines or interpolation. Rather, I see signs of heavy video compression. This is a low-quality video recording, and what you're seeing are artifacts of that.
  • The screen dimensions are identical because it's 4:3, the aspect ratio of SDTV. There is nothing remarkable about that aspect ratio matching emulators using NTSC shaders, and it is not distinctive to emulators.
Revenant
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Re: Final Fantasy VI SPC playback missing an instrument

Post by Revenant »

I seriously cannot believe this discussion is still going, but...

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/43107309/ff6.ogg

Here's a recording from my own real flesh-and-blood SNES (and here's the actual capture, in case you don't trust it for some reason...) I had to set the game to output mono instead of stereo because of a problem with my console, but other than that I still don't hear what you're talking about.
tcaudilllg
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Re: Final Fantasy VI SPC playback missing an instrument

Post by tcaudilllg »

Thanks to the good people at ff6hacking (not to mention your "Friendly Neighborhood ROMz Site"), I was able to get... closer to the bottom of the mystery. A review of FF3 US ROM v 1.0 reveals the following instrument set for "The Decisive Battle".

00 0D 00 0E 00 1E 00 02 00 0F 00 11 00 12 00 22 00 21 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

Each byte-word is a reference to the instrument table (00 00 is null). The last specified instrument is the "heavy snare", the dominant percussion instrument which every official recording of the song uses.

But Uematsu apparently either had a change of heart, or something else entirely happened; because by version 1.1 (Revision "A", which corrected the Draw glitch), we get this:

00 0D 00 0E 00 1E 00 02 00 0F 00 11 00 12 00 22 00 14 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

The heavy was replaced with the snare. So there are AT LEAST two versions of "The Decisive Battle" in existence. It's fully possible that "Revision B" existed, but was never dumped and thus, lost to time. This revision may well have used the sweep instrument instead of the snare. After surveying all the surviving ROM sites, it seems they all use the GoodSNES dumps from 1996 and 2000, so it's respectably possible that additional versions existed. Still, it's a game issue and not an emulation issue, so I'm dropping the topic.
Last edited by tcaudilllg on Tue Sep 27, 2016 1:04 am, edited 1 time in total.
niconii
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Re: Final Fantasy VI SPC playback missing an instrument

Post by niconii »

Okay, that's exactly what we needed. I just wish you'd gone about this in a more cheritable way, even if you were half-right in the end; calling all FF6 hardware recordings forgeries was going a bit overboard.

EDIT: Or not, I guess, judging from the next post? Wasn't in a position to verify the ROMs myself.
Last edited by niconii on Tue Sep 27, 2016 12:32 am, edited 3 times in total.
AWJ
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Re: Final Fantasy VI SPC playback missing an instrument

Post by AWJ »

tcaudilllg wrote:Thanks to the good people at ff6hacking (not to mention your "Friendly Neighborhood ROMz Site"), I was able to get to the bottom of the mystery. A review of FF3 US ROM v 1.0 reveals the following instrument set for.

00 0D 00 0E 00 1E 00 02 00 0F 00 11 00 12 00 22 00 21 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

That last one is the "kick", the dominant percussion instrument which every official recording of the song uses.

But Uematsu apparently either had a change of heart, or something else entirely happened; because by version 1.1 (Revision "A", which corrected the Draw glitch), we get this:

00 0D 00 0E 00 1E 00 02 00 0F 00 11 00 12 00 22 00 14 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

The kick was replaced with the snare (e.g. the clap). So there are two versions of "The Decisive Battle" in existence (but by no fault of emulation).
I've compared verified dumps of all three releases of the game (FFVI Japan, FFIII US 1.0, and FFIII US 1.1) and all of them contain the second bytestring, with $14 as the last instrument. If you have a ROM with $21 in that string then it's a hacked ROM or a bad dump.

As a matter of fact bank $C5 (offset $50000-$5FFFF) is 100% identical in all three versions of the game (not surprising, why would they change the music in a bugfix revision?)

Also, the instrument set you've indicated seems to be for the normal battle music, not the boss battle music. If I try overwriting it with random values, the normal battle music is the one that changes; the boss battle music isn't affected at all.
tcaudilllg
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Re: Final Fantasy VI SPC playback missing an instrument

Post by tcaudilllg »

The address of the boss theme instrument list is $054415.

The thing is, it seems like we can't know for sure that there were only two releases of the game in the USA. There were like 200,000 copies or more made and we don't know the schedule of their release. I remember there being copies of FF6 in all its $80 dollar glory well into 1996 at Walmart, Kmart and others.
Revenant
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Re: Final Fantasy VI SPC playback missing an instrument

Post by Revenant »

tcaudilllg wrote:Thanks to the good people at ff6hacking (not to mention your "Friendly Neighborhood ROMz Site"), I was able to get... closer to the bottom of the mystery. A review of FF3 US ROM v 1.0 reveals the following instrument set for "The Decisive Battle".

00 0D 00 0E 00 1E 00 02 00 0F 00 11 00 12 00 22 00 21 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Seconding what AWJ basically already said, this string of bytes doesn't occur anywhere in any of the four versions of the game currently listed by No-Intro. There could well be another revision of the game floating around out there, but I'm pretty skeptical that it's any different in this specific regard.

(I don't have any of whatever known bad dumps might be listed by GoodSNES, so I can't check those.)
niconii
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Re: Final Fantasy VI SPC playback missing an instrument

Post by niconii »

I'm... starting to feel like you're the sort of person who just won't admit when they might have been mistaken about something.

You keep grasping at straws to come up with elaborate reasons why you must be right: the videos are fake, the CD rips are fake, people just aren't listening to the CD, it's a never-before-noticed revision difference between v1.0 and v1.1 (which I'm starting to think was your attempt to bail out of the discussion), and now it's a never-before-seen revision entirely...

At some point, you've gotta admit that maybe the simplest explanation is that you just happened to remember it wrong. If you're afraid that admitting that would make you look bad, in all honesty it'd make you look a lot better than what you're doing right now.

EDIT: And I'm not even saying you have to be wrong. It just seems like you won't even concede it as a possibility.
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