What is wrong with the NES Classic Edition noise emulation?

Discuss emulation of the Nintendo Entertainment System and Famicom.

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Great Hierophant
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What is wrong with the NES Classic Edition noise emulation?

Post by Great Hierophant »

I have had a chance to watch some Youtube videos posted in the past 24 hours showcasing the NES Classic Edition and they confirmed what I had suspected from the last crop of Nintendo's videos, the noise channel emulation of the NES Classic Edition is noticeably off. Many sound effects just sound wrong. I commented on it on NintendoAge some time ago, but no one else has. I did not want to cause too much of a fuss, but the reviewers are now doing unboxings. A casual player may not notice the inaccuracy, but once you do an A to B comparison, you cannot unhear it. Examples of wrong sound effects include :

Some percussion notes is off in SMB2, Metroid, Castlevania, Zelda 2 and Mega Man 2
Balloon popping sound in Balloon Fight
Enemy popping sound and fire power in Kirby's Adventure
Enemy defeat sound in StarTropics
Thunderclaps and machine gun fire in Super C
Dodging and gloves hitting gloves in Punch Out
Hitting the candles and enemies and breakable blocks with the whip and landing in a crouch in Castlevania, also the holy water fire.
The crushers in Metal Man's stage (not positive about this one) and Metal Man's metal blades in the boss battle
Enemy defeat sound in Ninja Gaiden, gun sound when Irene shoots Ryu, windmill slash
Block breaking in SMB3
Dialogue text in Zelda 2

I could go on and on, every game seems to suffer from the issue to some extent. The emulation is definitely second rate here. Is there any obvious fault in Nintendo's emulation of the NES's noise channel? The firmware cannot be updated, but maybe a later revision could implement a fix.

Here is the video I am listening to : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LijjUluVQ_U
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Dwedit
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Re: What is wrong with the NES Classic Edition noise emulati

Post by Dwedit »

Sounds like a bad period table.
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koitsu
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Re: What is wrong with the NES Classic Edition noise emulati

Post by koitsu »

Going completely off of Balloon Fight's balloon-popping sound: the frequency (i.e. octave) is wrong (too low on the NES Classic Edition). The same goes for the "lightning" sound in Super C. I didn't listen to anything else; that was all I needed.

I look forward to hearing how one goes about doing a F/W update on this device for emulation inaccuracies.
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rainwarrior
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Re: What is wrong with the NES Classic Edition noise emulati

Post by rainwarrior »

NES noise requires a significant amount of oversampling or the high frequency settings will sound like lower frequency white noise instead of taking on their characteristic softer sound. (Super C's percussion really stands out to me in this example.)

There's probably a bunch of subtle things wrong with the audio. I wouldn't expect them to ever do anything about it, though.

I'm reminded how Ufouria's music is still completely busted on virtual console because they don't support the PAL DPCM tuning.
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Re: What is wrong with the NES Classic Edition noise emulati

Post by Mednafen »

There's bad aliasing and the volume/envelope decay is messed up (too).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LijjUlu ... t=1h27m28s
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Re: What is wrong with the NES Classic Edition noise emulati

Post by nesrocks »

I also noticed the glaring problem and noticed that nobody was commenting on it. It is absolutely horrendous. How would nintendo let this pass is weird on itself, but the fact that virtually nobody noticed worried me some too.

Here's an example https://youtu.be/dgpBhguhGuk?t=2m0s
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Re: What is wrong with the NES Classic Edition noise emulati

Post by James »

Seems like their MMC3 emulation is incorrect. The status bar glitch in SMB3 doesn't look right:

Image
This is how it should look. It's missing on the NES classic.

In the videos I watched, scrolling isn't particularly smooth either, but I suppose that could be their capture device/Youtube.
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Great Hierophant
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Re: What is wrong with the NES Classic Edition noise emulati

Post by Great Hierophant »

I think they may specify settings for each game to try to hide the glitches, so SMB3 may have a less accurate MMC3 emulation than Kirby.

Several of these reviewers are not using 60fps, so their videos will be choppy. GameXplain's 1-hour streaming video was not, but the sheer ignorance of the commentator made it even worse. He did not know how to play some of these games.

I can't watch all these videos flooding Youtube, but if anyone points out one where they identify this sound issue, I would be interested in a link.
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Re: What is wrong with the NES Classic Edition noise emulati

Post by thefox »

Great Hierophant wrote:I think they may specify settings for each game to try to hide the glitches, so SMB3 may have a less accurate MMC3 emulation than Kirby.
Or maybe they hacked the ROM to fix the glitch. I guess we'll find out when people dump the ROMs from the thing. (Unrelatedly, the European version of SMB3 never had the glitch.)

As long as we're complaining, the CRT mode doesn't look good on this thing. Looks like they just applied a horizontal sine-wave-like offset with a shader. They should've used blargg's library.
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Re: What is wrong with the NES Classic Edition noise emulati

Post by nesrocks »

Great Hierophant wrote:I can't watch all these videos flooding Youtube, but if anyone points out one where they identify this sound issue, I would be interested in a link.
https://youtu.be/dgpBhguhGuk?t=2m0s

Exactly there where I linked. The sound of punches and kicks hitting is incredibly different.
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rainwarrior
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Re: What is wrong with the NES Classic Edition noise emulati

Post by rainwarrior »

thefox wrote:They should've used blargg's library.
Blargg's library is LGPL, so I don't think that was really an option.
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Re: What is wrong with the NES Classic Edition noise emulati

Post by tepples »

And if anyone reading this isn't aware of the implications of using LGPL software in closed platforms:

Programs using LGPL libraries must be distributed "under terms of your choice that, taken together, effectively do not restrict modification of the portions of the Library contained in the Combined Work and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications". For one thing, this explicitly permits mods of some sort, and Nintendo has historically called mods "criminal activity", in particular with respect to Project M and around the release of Super Mario Maker. For another, Nintendo would have to either
  1. provide the Corresponding Application Code (tht is, the proprietary parts) to the owner of each NES Classic Edition console in a form that can be combined with a modified version of the library, such as .o files, or
  2. package blargg's library as a shared library, such as a .dll or .so.
Either way, the user could add a "feature" to the library that allows loading ROMs from outside.

On the other hand, Nintendo could have implemented its own NTSC encoder and decoder.
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Re: What is wrong with the NES Classic Edition noise emulati

Post by thefox »

rainwarrior wrote:
thefox wrote:They should've used blargg's library.
Blargg's library is LGPL, so I don't think that was really an option.
My bad, somehow I remembered it used a permissive license.
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Re: What is wrong with the NES Classic Edition noise emulati

Post by koitsu »

Great Hierophant wrote:Several of these reviewers are not using 60fps, so their videos will be choppy. GameXplain's 1-hour streaming video was not, but the sheer ignorance of the commentator made it even worse.
Therein lies the ruse: that is the *exact* demographic this NES Classic Edition product caters to: people who don't know any better. It's a shitty "retro hipster" trend. It'll die eventually, rest assured, but probably not as soon as I'd like/hope.
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Re: What is wrong with the NES Classic Edition noise emulati

Post by Great Hierophant »

nesrocks wrote:
Great Hierophant wrote:I can't watch all these videos flooding Youtube, but if anyone points out one where they identify this sound issue, I would be interested in a link.
https://youtu.be/dgpBhguhGuk?t=2m0s

Exactly there where I linked. The sound of punches and kicks hitting is incredibly different.
I'm sorry, what I meant to say is show me where a Youtube commentator indicates that the sound is wrong. You can clearly hear the muddy sound of the punches landing in DD2, but there is no comment from the guy that posted the video that this sounds wrong.
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