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

Post by tokumaru »

When used in-game, Battletoads' PCM sound effects even break parallax effects, presumably because they steal all of the CPU's attention.
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Re: List of NES and Famicom games that use raw PCM (7-bit, e

Post by rainwarrior »

The other thing Battletoads does is drop out the PCM drums entirely for parts of the intro so that it can manage more animation.

Big Bird's Hide and Speak cuts many of its samples into separate segments to slip little animation updates in between them (mostly Big Bird's mouth), which I thought was interesting.
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Re: List of NES and Famicom games that use raw PCM (7-bit, e

Post by Bregalad »

When used in-game, Battletoads' PCM sound effects even break parallax effects, presumably because they steal all of the CPU's attention.
Yes, and by the was this was "fixed" in Battletoads & Double Dragon - the sound effects "breaks" instead of the parallax effect (visible in Stage 2 when scrolling).
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Re: List of NES and Famicom games that use raw PCM (7-bit, e

Post by Memblers »

Add Karate Champ to the list. Be-gin!

This isn't associated with a game, but back around 2004 I made my Squeedo synth cartridge. It's audio was generated by an MCU on cart, but was played through $4011. I guess it is still the only expansion audio cart for an unmodified NES?
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Re: List of NES and Famicom games that use raw PCM (7-bit, e

Post by bucky o'hare »

Bregalad wrote:Battletoads definitely pauses when playing PCM. Even in the intro. Just pay careful attention and you'll notice it.
Ah, I suppose it does! Of course there are parts where it drops out entirely when there's too much going on, but there are also parts where it's playing while text is being added to the screen and minor changes to the graphics are occurring. But it does have to alternate these tasks, and you see small pauses that delay the text being added to the screen. I thought at first the actions were woven together, but they are full-blown pauses that just happen to be pretty short (because drum samples aren't very long of course). I guess it deserves an honorable mention for trying to "get away with it". :beer:
Memblers wrote:Add Karate Champ to the list. Be-gin!

This isn't associated with a game, but back around 2004 I made my Squeedo synth cartridge. It's audio was generated by an MCU on cart, but was played through $4011. I guess it is still the only expansion audio cart for an unmodified NES?
Karate Champ is on there! :)

That's really cool! Do you have any videos/ audio of the device in action?

Super Russian Roulette is coming out very soon (now-ish?), which also hijacks the $4011, being fed PCM from another source (to be able to have lots of it).
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Re: List of NES and Famicom games that use raw PCM (7-bit, e

Post by jmr »

bucky o'hare wrote:Super Russian Roulette is coming out very soon (now-ish?), which also hijacks the $4011, being fed PCM from another source (to be able to have lots of it).
RetroUSB's A Winner Is You cart does something similar, from what I understand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNObZxrj_A4

I want to hit Batsly up at some point to see if doing a Marshall Art Cart album (Marshall Cart?), with the guitar parts and extra channels being driven through $4011 while the normal pulse/tri/noise channels still play their parts, is possible.
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Re: List of NES and Famicom games that use raw PCM (7-bit, e

Post by bucky o'hare »

I added Battletoads and Double Dragon (it was already mentioned, I just forgot to add it before), Mahjong Club - Nagatacho Sousaisen, and Emoyan no 10-bai Pro Yakyuu.
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Re: List of NES and Famicom games that use raw PCM (7-bit, e

Post by Memblers »

bucky o'hare wrote:
Memblers wrote: This isn't associated with a game, but back around 2004 I made my Squeedo synth cartridge. It's audio was generated by an MCU on cart, but was played through $4011. I guess it is still the only expansion audio cart for an unmodified NES?
That's really cool! Do you have any videos/ audio of the device in action?
I have some pictures, and audio recordings, but the recordings are very poor quality since at the time I was worried about using a bunch of bandwidth if I uploaded large files and stuff.
http://membler-industries.com/squeedo/2004_version/ in /samps/, 007.mp3 and 008.mp3 are it playing MML files. But it plays the wrong notes and goes out of tune and stuff, as it turns out there was a pre-existing bug in the version of MCK I was modifying for testing. This drove me nuts at the time since I couldn't find the problem anywhere in my own code! The synth ran on a PIC18F MCU, and it did 4 channels of audio mixed at 32khz. It was mostly wavetable synthesis, 256 8-bit samples with 8-bit volume control. But there was also a noise generator.

If you look in the directory above that link, you can see the redesigned version I started around 2009 or so. But that version has never been built onto an NES cart, unfortunately.
Super Russian Roulette is coming out very soon (now-ish?), which also hijacks the $4011, being fed PCM from another source (to be able to have lots of it).
Yeah it's pretty cool, I don't know what hardware is on there exactly, but if it's like A Winner Is You, I mostly consider it a memory expansion since there's no DSP action involved. Though that could be considered a pedantic point, hehe. Pretty soon I'll be trying an experiment with an on-cart MP3 player for a certain project, that too could hold a lot of audio.

BTW I'm really enjoying the Retro Game Audio podcast now. Was especially cool to hear that interview with Dave Warhol.
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B00daW
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Re: List of NES and Famicom games that use raw PCM (7-bit, e

Post by B00daW »

Wait... so all of those channels were just pumped out $4011? I was previously under the impression that you were IRQ timing the other waveforms to make other instrument timbres. For example, turning Triangle into Sine.
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Re: List of NES and Famicom games that use raw PCM (7-bit, e

Post by bucky o'hare »

A little unrelated to the main list, but I recall a long time ago there was a demo posted here of an NES ROM that simply had spoken PCM audio along the lines of "What should an NES sound like?" Does anyone recall who made it, and is that ROM still kicking around?
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Re: List of NES and Famicom games that use raw PCM (7-bit, e

Post by tepples »

That was my first tech demo of QuaDPCM, the codec that eventually went into the Action 53 menu. The voice is mine.
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Re: List of NES and Famicom games that use raw PCM (7-bit, e

Post by bucky o'hare »

Yes! Awesome. That's one of the first things that made me wonder about the potential of PCM. :beer:
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Re: List of NES and Famicom games that use raw PCM (7-bit, e

Post by SuperWill24 »

What about the following games:
Aussie Rules Footy
A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia
Dirty Harry: The War Against Drugs
Dizzy the Adventurer
F-15 Strike Eagle
International Cricket
Jurassic Park
Krusty's Fun House
The Ultimate Stuntman

The Adventures of Bayou Billy and Blades of Steel should be removed, as they are DPCM. And Final Mission (S.C.A.T.) was also released in Europe as Action in New York.
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Re: List of NES and Famicom games that use raw PCM (7-bit, e

Post by MrNorbert1994 »

SuperWill24 wrote:What about the following games:
Aussie Rules Footy
A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia
Dirty Harry: The War Against Drugs
Dizzy the Adventurer
F-15 Strike Eagle
International Cricket
Jurassic Park
Krusty's Fun House
The Ultimate Stuntman

The Adventures of Bayou Billy and Blades of Steel should be removed, as they are DPCM. And Final Mission (S.C.A.T.) was also released in Europe as Action in New York.
"A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia" This game doesn't use PCM.
I thought Jurassic Park's samples are all generic DPCM.

Anyway... I added these games to my list of games with incomplete NSF files.
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Re: List of NES and Famicom games that use raw PCM (7-bit, e

Post by bucky o'hare »

SuperWill24 wrote:What about the following games:
Aussie Rules Footy
A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia
Dirty Harry: The War Against Drugs
Dizzy the Adventurer
F-15 Strike Eagle
International Cricket
Jurassic Park
Krusty's Fun House
The Ultimate Stuntman

The Adventures of Bayou Billy and Blades of Steel should be removed, as they are DPCM. And Final Mission (S.C.A.T.) was also released in Europe as Action in New York.
Ah, yeah Dirty Harry is supposed to be on there. I'll double check some more of these!
edit: Thank you for all the additions! They've all been added to the list asides from A Boy and His Blob (unless I'm missing it somewhere).
And The Ultimate Stuntman uses it during music and gameplay! That's the most interesting thing that was missing from the list.

Adventures of Bayou Billy and Blades of Steel do use raw PCM for their title screen speech.
Last edited by bucky o'hare on Sat Aug 05, 2017 9:34 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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