The popular opinion on Genesis vs SNES sound

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psycopathicteen
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Re: The popular opinion on Genesis vs SNES sound

Post by psycopathicteen »

I think Mega Man's music is pretty good except for the electric guitar. Wild Gun from Natsume uses a similar sample library except they switched the electric guitar sample with another one.

It seems like the supervisors at Capcom wanted their programmers to reuse old code as long as they possibly can, even when it's outdated and inefficient. Every fighting game from Final Fight to Street Fighter Alpha used the same crappy VRAM and DMA management code. Let's write to DMA registers one byte at a time so we need freaking big black bars!
Revenant
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Re: The popular opinion on Genesis vs SNES sound

Post by Revenant »

93143 wrote:What? Whose engine does it use?
Believe it or not, according to my (incomplete) sound driver list, it uses Nintendo's. Bregalad may be able to clarify/correct that, since I haven't specifically looked into SFA2 before.

(The tool and signatures I use to generate that file are here. There's some probably obvious omissions, like Konami games etc. but I haven't updated this in a while)
psycopathicteen
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Re: The popular opinion on Genesis vs SNES sound

Post by psycopathicteen »

Huh! Did any other N-SPC game have load times?
Revenant
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Re: The popular opinion on Genesis vs SNES sound

Post by Revenant »

Well, in a strictly pedantic sense, they pretty much all did.

Whether any of them used a similar amount of pure data compared to SFA2 is a different question :P
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Fisher
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Re: The popular opinion on Genesis vs SNES sound

Post by Fisher »

Batman Forever seems to load a lot!!
psycopathicteen
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Re: The popular opinion on Genesis vs SNES sound

Post by psycopathicteen »

93143 wrote:Using indirect HDMA to send data to the APU ports could be very light on the S-CPU, if rather time-consuming on the S-SMP... Unless I've misunderstood how indirect HDMA works, updating the table each frame should be pretty quick.

Your big audio streaming project happens to use regular DMA during the frame, so you can't do this because of the 1/1/1 bug. But from the S-CPU's perspective it's effectively half-speed DMA to audio RAM (the overhead roughly matches the actual transfer time at 4 bytes per line indirect). N-Warp Daisakusen does HDMA streaming at 4 bytes per line, and I think the APU-side code could be sped up considerably with careful attention to synchronization.

Still, it remains significant that apparently no one did this during the commercial lifetime of the system (apparently even ToP and SO use manual CPU writes)...
I need to redo Bad Apple soon, but I need to come up with some form of faster compression without using DMA to fill out the tile map.
psycopathicteen
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Re: The popular opinion on Genesis vs SNES sound

Post by psycopathicteen »

Actually I have an idea. I can decompress the tile map during vblank, directly into VRAM.
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Dwedit
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Re: The popular opinion on Genesis vs SNES sound

Post by Dwedit »

Revenant wrote:
93143 wrote:What? Whose engine does it use?
Believe it or not, according to my (incomplete) sound driver list, it uses Nintendo's. Bregalad may be able to clarify/correct that, since I haven't specifically looked into SFA2 before.

(The tool and signatures I use to generate that file are here. There's some probably obvious omissions, like Konami games etc. but I haven't updated this in a while)
It has some glaring omissions, like the Tim/Geoff Follin sound engine.
Here come the fortune cookies! Here come the fortune cookies! They're wearing paper hats!
Revenant
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Re: The popular opinion on Genesis vs SNES sound

Post by Revenant »

If you mean the one in e.g. Plok, that's the Software Creations sound driver written by Paul Tonge. It was also used in a number of games that the Follins weren't involved with, including games not actually developed by Software Creations, such as Winter Gold and the unreleased Pocahontas.

There are other drivers that I'm moderately aware of, like that one, which I just haven't attempted to create reliable signatures for yet.
ccovell
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Re: The popular opinion on Genesis vs SNES sound

Post by ccovell »

Hmm, interesting. Paul Tonge was pretty much the only person that made fantastic music on the Atari Lynx.
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