List of NES and Famicom games that use raw PCM (7-bit, etc)

Discuss NSF files, FamiTracker, MML tools, or anything else related to NES music.

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rainwarrior
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Re: List of NES and Famicom games that use raw PCM (7-bit, e

Post by rainwarrior »

bucky o'hare wrote:Adventures of Bayou Billy and Blades of Steel do use raw PCM for their title screen speech.
Are there multiple versions of Bayou Billy...? Or is there some way to trigger a speech sound on the title screen? The sound test mode doesn't appear to have any PCM samples, though it has several DPCM ones.

Blades of Steel uses PCM for other stuff too like "face off". Kinda depends on whether it's a sound that can interrupt gameplay or not. (Kind of unusual as a game that uses both!)
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Re: List of NES and Famicom games that use raw PCM (7-bit, e

Post by bucky o'hare »

Ah, The Bayou Billy one triggers after pressing start to start the game. So technically after the title screen in that case.
I missed the other examples from Blades of Steel, I probably only checked "get the pass" and assumed the rest were going to be DPCM as well. Good find.
Last edited by bucky o'hare on Sat Aug 05, 2017 9:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: List of NES and Famicom games that use raw PCM (7-bit, e

Post by bucky o'hare »

MrNorbert1994 wrote: I thought Jurassic Park's samples are all generic DPCM.
It turns out there is a PCM sample for the T-Rex roaring in the intro/ title sequence. Not sure if there's other examples yet but in the music and most SFX the samples do seem to be regular DPCM.
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rainwarrior
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Re: List of NES and Famicom games that use raw PCM (7-bit, e

Post by rainwarrior »

bucky o'hare wrote:Ah, The Bayou Billy one triggers after pressing start to start the game. So technically after the title screen in that case.
Ah, thanks. I don't know how I managed to miss that ha ha.
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Re: List of NES and Famicom games that use raw PCM (7-bit, e

Post by SuperWill24 »

bucky o'hare wrote:Ah, The Bayou Billy one triggers after pressing start to start the game. So technically after the title screen in that case.
I missed the other examples from Blades of Steel, I probably only checked "get the pass" and assumed the rest were going to be DPCM as well. Good find.

As I said before, the sample saying "The Adventures of Bayou Billy." is definitely just DPCM.
I also found another game that uses raw PCM: WWF King of the Ring.
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rainwarrior
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Re: List of NES and Famicom games that use raw PCM (7-bit, e

Post by rainwarrior »

SuperWill24 wrote:As I said before, the sample saying "The Adventures of Bayou Billy." is definitely just DPCM.
No, it absolutely is not DPCM. It's writing $4011 roughly every 86 cycles for the duration of that sound.

I only missed when I was initially looking for it because you can accidentally skip it if you're mashing buttons to get started.
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Re: List of NES and Famicom games that use raw PCM (7-bit, e

Post by SuperWill24 »

rainwarrior wrote:
SuperWill24 wrote:As I said before, the sample saying "The Adventures of Bayou Billy." is definitely just DPCM.
No, it absolutely is not DPCM. It's writing $4011 roughly every 86 cycles for the duration of that sound.
Listen, I don't need to argue about this, but...
I know it's DPCM (the encoding) because I could convert it properly to WAV with Tepples's tool to do so (18.exe), and it sounds perfect. I have an attached WAV file (had to rename the extension) that I have converted from the ROM with the code/data logger. The sample also clearly sounds like DPCM to me in-game. Plus, Konami ALWAYS seems to use DPCM for their sampled audio.
It does seem weird that it's writing $4011 so many times, though. Maybe it's playing the DPCM and converting it to raw PCM? That doesn't really make sense, but I don't really know for sure. Maybe someone could take a look at this?
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Re: List of NES and Famicom games that use raw PCM (7-bit, e

Post by rainwarrior »

Ah, well that's interesting then. This means that the sample is stored in ROM in the 1-bit DPCM format, but it's played back with a software decoder that converts it to PCM first. That's pretty bizarre? It's not that unusual for the PCM to be decompressed from another format, but from a format the hardware already natively supports??

It's definitely not using the DPCM hardware to play it back but apparently yes the sample itself is encoded in the 1-bit DPCM format.

The music tracks use hardware DPCM constantly.
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Re: List of NES and Famicom games that use raw PCM (7-bit, e

Post by NewRisingSun »

It's decoding DPCM data manually so it can retrieve the DPCM data from the $8000 bank. Playing DPCM via DMA would require it to be placed in the $C000 bank on standard NES/Famicom hardware.
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Re: List of NES and Famicom games that use raw PCM (7-bit, e

Post by tepples »

In other words, it's using the Blades of Steel trick: software decoding of DPCM data outside the fixed bank.
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