16-bit stereo 32 kHz streaming success

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pcmantinker
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Post by pcmantinker »

It's truly amazing to hear such great quality music come from the SNES. Would it be possible to play a song longer than one minute? I realize the rom size would be significantly larger, but it could be done on the PowerPak provided it is less than 128Mbits. I realize 16MB is a lot of data for one song in particular, but it would be pretty cool to play a 3-5 minute song on the SNES. Maybe functionality for an MP3 player could be added to the PowerPak if blargg were able to colaborate with bunnyboy on the coding. A converter would need to be written for the PC to down sample songs so that they could be played back on the SNES. Just some thoughts.
Marvin
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Post by Marvin »

Well decoding MP3 takes serious CPU resources that the SNES does not have. But it would be cool to have a utility to convert music to this ROM and use it on a PowerPak. Too bad it is limited by 128mbit. As far as I get it - it is not possible to use the CF card on the PowerPak directly (like a media player on a SNES) but everything that the SNES reads is first copied to the 128mbit RAM chip and then the SNES can read it. Maybe playtime can be optimized with a really simple lossless coding (should be less calculations than lossy)? Or maybe PowerPak developer has some nice tricks up his sleeve that could update the 128mbit RAM area while it is in use ... let's say it is split in half and when the first half is read the second is updated and the other way around? Well these are all fantastic ideas but ASM is way over my head to even start to think about this.

Oh and PowerPak has DSP-1, is it of any use for audio? :)
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blargg
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Post by blargg »

I actually use 2:1 compression for this demo ROM, using an 8-bit mantissa and 3-bit exponent (shared among groups of 15*2 samples). I'm told someone else has written a 4:1 ADPCM decompressor, which might be more appropriate if length is more important than quality.

Apparently you can make 12MB SNES ROMs, or even higher with custom chips. The PowerPak could certainly allow some kind of banked or streamed access to the entire CF card, for even greater capacities. I'm not sure what use it is besides a tech demo though. :)
Marvin
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Post by Marvin »

Well imagine ... playing for many hours and then without moving going to The Dark Side of the Moon 8)
Eyedunno
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Post by Eyedunno »

blargg wrote:I'm not sure what use it is besides a tech demo though. :)
It's a pretty nifty tech demo though. I now have it as the lone ROM in the root of my PowerPak (the games are all in directories). :)
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blargg
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Post by blargg »

Sounds like I need to release a version that can play uncompressed PCM, and perhaps the compressor or something. Sort of an extended ringtones for the SNES. :)
Marvin
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Post by Marvin »

That would be awesome! SoX http://sox.sourceforge.net/ could be used as a first step to downsample/change bit depth/format.
Eyedunno
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Post by Eyedunno »

blargg wrote:Sounds like I need to release a version that can play uncompressed PCM, and perhaps the compressor or something. Sort of an extended ringtones for the SNES. :)
At the risk of redundancy, that would be awesome (and ADPCM support would be even better).
johannesmutlu
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justifiyng the snes sound revolution

Post by johannesmutlu »

i ,m glad to know that the snes is capable of true 16bit stereo 32khz sound.
But sadly no game had ever made full use of it.
this proves for once and for all that the snes sound is better then the megadrive & gba,despites the gba cpu is 32bit (wich could even decompress mp3 files on the fly while running a game),but it's dac's are just 8bit.
I,ve played this 1 minute sound demo on the powerpak, so if we will ever find a way of exceeding the 128mb limit of the powerpak by using a cluster chain file system trough an os update. It may be possible to take full advantage of the cf flashcard space to play for instance a 10 minute audio recording on it.
Note; exeeding the 512 kb limit on the nes powerpak has been barely proven trough a cluster chain format rom and the required update to achief this.
It does this by updating the 512KB space once needed.
Last edited by johannesmutlu on Sun Sep 25, 2016 1:40 pm, edited 2 times in total.
tepples
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Post by tepples »

this proves for once and for all that the snes sound comes close to cd,it,s better then the gba
"Better" is subjective.

One might argue the GBA sound is "better" because the GBA has the CPU power to decompress recorded music in real time, at the same time as playing a game, using a more sophisticated codec than BRR. What does 30 kbps GSM sound like?

I'm pretty sure the CD add-on would have used the audio in pins.
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Zepper
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Post by Zepper »

tepples wrote:
this proves for once and for all that the snes sound comes close to cd,it,s better then the gba
"Better" is subjective.
- Surely it is.
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TmEE
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Post by TmEE »

Is interpolation bypassed when one uses the echo buffer to play samples ?
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Bregalad
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Post by Bregalad »

Yes of course.
Useless, lumbering half-wits don't scare us.
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TmEE
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Post by TmEE »

In that case : awesome :)
KungFuFurby
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Post by KungFuFurby »

Your demo is unique in that not a single channel is apparantley used... on SNES9X, muting the channel does nothing to the sound.
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