SNES Music Pack 1 by Resistance

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Revenant
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SNES Music Pack 1 by Resistance

Post by Revenant »

I helped put together a new collection of SNES music for the wild compo at Revision 2021. (Two SNES releases at one party?!)

Download:
http://resistance.no/releases/snes/RSE- ... cPack1.zip

Info:
http://demozoo.org/productions/292453/
https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=88630

Video:
https://revenant1.net/rse-music-full.mp4

Image
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Nikku4211
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Re: SNES Music Pack 1 by Resistance

Post by Nikku4211 »

Amazing.

What's with the video's aspect ratio, though? It's a bit wider, like if you were to play an NTSC DVD using square pixels for some reason.

Also those samples are really high quality. Are they all 22-32 kHz?
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lidnariq
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Re: SNES Music Pack 1 by Resistance

Post by lidnariq »

PAL SNES, like other 256-pixel-wide consoles in 50Hz regions, has a pixel aspect ratio of ~7:5. So the 256x224 mode on a PAL SNES is a display aspect ratio of ~16:10.
tepples
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Re: SNES Music Pack 1 by Resistance

Post by tepples »

Unlike the exact rational PAR of NTSC, the exact PAR of 50 Hz PAL involves some fairly big prime numbers such as 64489. This gives the fraction 2950000:2128137 ≈ 1.3862, and the unwieldiness of this is why I waited so long before establishing a 50 Hz counterpart to my long-running list of dot clock rates in 60 Hz picture generators.

Perhaps the most useful fractional approximation of the pixel aspect ratio of a PAL NES or PAL Super NES is 18:13 ≈ 1.3846. (I used 11:8 = 1.375 in the Linearity pattern of 240p Test Suite because I needed either the numerator or denominator to be 8, the width in pixels of a tile column or height in scanlines of a tile row.) The 18:13 ratio lends itself to using 52x72 DPI for preview in paint programs, such as GIMP with "Dot for Dot" turned off.
Revenant
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Re: SNES Music Pack 1 by Resistance

Post by Revenant »

I'm not really sure why PAL aspect ratios are relevant, considering I recorded that video off of an NTSC console via S-Video.

(as for why the video has the aspect ratio it does: beats me. I just record what my capture device gives me.)
lidnariq
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Re: SNES Music Pack 1 by Resistance

Post by lidnariq »

My mistake, I just assumed demoscene therefore PAL.

The DAR I see here is 1.426, or 7% wider than than 4:3 DAR US SNES should have. No idea how that's happening.

edit: If it were a whole 10%, it'd be due to treating the standard BT.601 13.5MHz pixels as square (when they're 10:11 PAR).
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Nikku4211
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Re: SNES Music Pack 1 by Resistance

Post by Nikku4211 »

lidnariq wrote: Mon Apr 05, 2021 10:54 am PAL SNES, like other 256-pixel-wide consoles in 50Hz regions, has a pixel aspect ratio of ~7:5. So the 256x224 mode on a PAL SNES is a display aspect ratio of ~16:10.
I thought that at first, but then I realised that Revenant is from Florida, which is a United State of America.
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Revenant
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Re: SNES Music Pack 1 by Resistance

Post by Revenant »

It does look a bit wide now that you mention it, though; I guess I just got accustomed to my USB captures looking that way. I'll have to fiddle around with it next time I'm recording something.

Anyway, not to get on too much of a tangent:
Nikku4211 wrote: Mon Apr 05, 2021 9:35 am Also those samples are really high quality. Are they all 22-32 kHz?
Not all of them, but maybe about half or so of the samples across the entire collection are 22kHz or higher (for example, all of the percussion samples in "Krono Spiegel" are 44.1kHz before conversion).
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Nikku4211
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Re: SNES Music Pack 1 by Resistance

Post by Nikku4211 »

Revenant wrote: Mon Apr 05, 2021 8:10 pm It does look a bit wide now that you mention it, though; I guess I just got accustomed to my USB captures looking that way. I'll have to fiddle around with it next time I'm recording something.
Don't worry, I'm already fiddling with FFMPEG to crop and scale your video. Another issue it has is that the black bars are actually encoded into the video, which is not efficient when streaming and also pointless since the extra space is never used. \
No, YouTube won't encode black bars into your video if you plan to upload it there. The new player is supposed to change its proportions to fit many different horizontal video aspect ratios anyway.
Revenant wrote: Mon Apr 05, 2021 8:10 pm Anyway, not to get on too much of a tangent:
Nikku4211 wrote: Mon Apr 05, 2021 9:35 am Also those samples are really high quality. Are they all 22-32 kHz?
Not all of them, but maybe about half or so of the samples across the entire collection are 22kHz or higher (for example, all of the percussion samples in "Krono Spiegel" are 44.1kHz before conversion).
Well, I was talking about the quality of the samples after conversion, as I am interested in how the quality turned out on the SNES itself.

EDIT: My proper aspect ratio 720p60 upload is up.
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Revenant
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Re: SNES Music Pack 1 by Resistance

Post by Revenant »

Nikku4211 wrote: Tue Apr 06, 2021 7:14 am Well, I was talking about the quality of the samples after conversion, as I am interested in how the quality turned out on the SNES itself.
I assume snesmod didn't touch any of the ones that were below 32kHz, but I'm not sure if it automatically downsamples anything above that or not.
Nokia3310
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Re: SNES Music Pack 1 by Resistance

Post by Nokia3310 »

Krono Spiegel and One More Chance are my favourites. Great compositions and impressive that you've made these work on a SNES. Is the intention just for general listening or do you have games in mind when you make these?
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Re: SNES Music Pack 1 by Resistance

Post by Nikku4211 »

Nokia3310 wrote: Fri Apr 23, 2021 4:14 pm Krono Spiegel and One More Chance are my favourites. Great compositions and impressive that you've made these work on a SNES. Is the intention just for general listening or do you have games in mind when you make these?
Considering how the demoscene is, it's likely just general listening.

If you're making a SNES game, you'd be working under much tighter rules than if you were to just make music for a SNES demo/musicdisk.

Video games need to store sound effects in the same 64 kibibytes of audio RAM as the music, and if you have the entire song take up most of audio RAM, you'll have to load each song in every time they need to play.

This would be fine if you're only switching music between different screens, but no one wants to play a game where, for example, the game pauses for a while when you get an invincibility item just to load in the invincibility theme.

Also, in a game, you may or may not be concerned about how you use your ROM space. Especially since a lot of the ROM would be taken up by graphics data, collision data, and look-up tables. You can compress graphics, sure, but then you'd have an issue of not being able to load graphics all willy-nilly whenever you want because it takes time to decompress, and it also takes a toll on your WRAM.

Then again, in the era of flashcarts and emulation, it'd be understandable to want to make a game with >6 mebibytes.
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creaothceann
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Re: SNES Music Pack 1 by Resistance

Post by creaothceann »

Nikku4211 wrote: Sat Apr 24, 2021 8:39 pm Video games need to store sound effects in the same 64 kibibytes of audio RAM as the music, and if you have the entire song take up most of audio RAM, you'll have to load each song in every time they need to play.

This would be fine if you're only switching music between different screens, but no one wants to play a game where, for example, the game pauses for a while when you get an invincibility item just to load in the invincibility theme.
The music could be streamed via HDMA.
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Nikku4211
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Re: SNES Music Pack 1 by Resistance

Post by Nikku4211 »

creaothceann wrote: Sun Apr 25, 2021 5:17 am The music could be streamed via HDMA.
It could be, sure. After all, there are some SNES games like Wayne's World and NBA Live that stream music to ARAM(though I don't know if they use HDMA or something else).

I guess since you have 8 DMA channels, you might not be using a lot of them during gameplay.
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93143
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Re: SNES Music Pack 1 by Resistance

Post by 93143 »

There's not much point in using more than one HDMA channel for streaming, as a single channel can saturate the I/O ports on its own. The SPC700 can't turn around anywhere near fast enough to handle more than one four-byte shot in a single HBlank.

Also, real streaming music eats a lot of ROM. If you managed to get 32 KHz stereo working, you'd be consuming over 2 MB per minute. It would probably be better to use streaming for playback and/or hotswapping of samples, combined with more conventional music sequencing.

The MSU1 could solve the ROM problem, but it also removes or greatly reduces the necessity of streaming music with HDMA...

...

Also, Wayne's World? What did they stream in that game? The soundtrack sounds like WarpSpeed plus cheap guitars.
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