Re: Best uses of the SNES's 64KB of audio ram
Posted: Wed Nov 22, 2017 1:27 pm
Listened to them side by side, its a placebo effect.
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Interesting technique, but this would by no mean be limited to high hat, but could be applicable to many other instruments, melodic or percussion.lazygecko wrote: Another cool trick he did are the hihats in Plok. In the beach music for example, the way the hihats are played are not by the standard method of just retriggering the sample. Instead it's a cymbal sound just continually looped while the volume is automated separately from standard instrument envelopes. So each new "note" will be played from a different offset in the sample, making it sound less repetitive and much more natural.
For future reference, the song is Tori. Indeed it's genius. His music for Solstice is already genious, but I am much less familiar with Equinox.Probably the coolest single example I can think of is Equinox, where in one ambient track you hear this very nice waterdrop sound effect with a very long tonal reverb. I thought to myself there was no way he'd fit that in there as a single sample, so I took a closer look, and the way he did it was to use a separate dry waterdrop sound, and then he made this seamless looping reverb noise that is dynamically faded in and out. Genius.
Good use of the ARAM in that. The word "crisp" comes to mind. Decent reverb too, which you don't always get (the Follins in particular seem to have ignored the echo feature entirely).TmEE wrote:Code: Select all
Energy Breaker
Sparkster's audio didn't win an award for nothing. It has arguably some of the best on the SNES. The instruments sound great and are well-EQ'd (much less emphasis on the muddy mid frequencies). The snare is distinctive. Some of the instruments (especially the brass) sound as if they came right out of an anime. As for sound effects, when I heard the big stereo explosion for the first time I figured it was taken straight from a high-quality cinema sound effects CD (especially because not long before playing the game I had one such CD).TmEE wrote:OK :
Sparkster.rsn
I wouldn't really say that either. Neo Geo's PCM has a sample rate cap of 18khz with no filtering which gives it a much more harsh and lo-fi sound compared to SNES, even if it's not nearly as hindered by memory bottlenecks.93143 wrote:Sparkster sounds like a Neo Geo game.
It may be bread and butter tech now, but interpolation was a big novelty at the time. Any sample-based chips were expected to have that crunchy, aliased/"digital" sound, but the SPC700 greatly mitgated that which made it really stand out, for better or worse (I think it's a really double edged sword).psycopathicteen wrote:I was surprised to learn how wasteful the Neo Geo's sound chip is with memory, because every note has to be individually sampled. I think the 18 kHz vs 32 kHz is kind've misleading because the SNES has Gaussian interpolation.
I'm still baffled at why the SPC700 has something as complicated as Gaussian interpolation in it, if the silicon could've been used else where. How about being able to do that fancy multiplication inside the main CPU?
Personally I think Sparkster sounds very standard for a SNES game, not particularly good nor particularly bad. I don't see why it was mentioned in this thread.lazygecko wrote:That's funny, cause I don't really like the way Sparkster sounds for the same reason.
Ha, I saw some GBA games doing it this way (presumably to save CPU time) and I was bluffed but apparently it's not the only system where this was done.I was surprised to learn how wasteful the Neo Geo's sound chip is with memory, because every note has to be individually sampled
I agree, this was very advanced for 1990. It took time before early SNES emus supported interpolation, just to show how an advanced feature it was.I'm still baffled at why the SPC700 has something as complicated as Gaussian interpolation in it, if the silicon could've been used else where.
Then they should have had a per-channel disablable interpolation? (Like Echo, for instance). It's always enabled and can't be taken out.but the SPC700 greatly mitgated that which made it really stand out, for better or worse (I think it's a really double edged sword).
It's definitely clearer, but it has the same "toy instrument" sound as most early SNES games, unfortunately (at least it's not the Mega Man X 2 & 3 shit instrumentation). The composition is also pretty weak; nothing really stands out in my opinion. The lack of more "gritty" music on the SNES really bothers me; you either have something orchestral like Super Castlevania IV or something more "bubbly/playful" like Super Mario World. You can tell Capcom tried with their older games, but their attempt falls on its face. I think R-Type III is about the only game that ever gets close to sounding something like Thunder Force IV or many other Genesis games. The sound samples are really low quality though, but I'll still take it over Sparkster any day.Bregalad wrote:Personally I think Sparkster sounds very standard for a SNES game, not particularly good nor particularly bad. I don't see why it was mentioned in this thread.
I hope not; that processor is more than powerful enough to mix sound. I bet assembly was pretty much dead at this time though like it is now, so I don't really know.Bregalad wrote:Ha, I saw some GBA games doing it this way (presumably to save CPU time)
I'd say it's better in the vast majority of cases; we're talking about only 64KB of audio ram. It'd probably sound awful otherwise. The argument is generally whether lower quality samples with Gaussian interpolation sound as good as higher quality ones without it.lazygecko wrote:the SPC700 greatly mitgated that which made it really stand out, for better or worse (I think it's a really double edged sword).
Definitely. I still can't help but feel that the sound chip was poorly designed though; why would you have only have 4 FM channels with 6 PCM channels lack any sort of pitch control? (PSG had really already fallen out of style by 1990.) Are you really planning on having that many sound effects in a game at once? (Changing the pitch generally isn't a concern here.) I've said it before, but I think the Neo Geo is really overrated hardware wise. It's not much if any better than the CPS1, and that's from 1987. The only real advantage I see the Neo Geo has is 16 bit color, which is admittedly pretty big even here. Of course, the main time this really becomes an issue is with large gradients, and dithering works better on the CPS1 because of the wider resolution...lazygecko wrote:Regarding the Neo Geo, I think it was pretty much designed to have the FM and PSG at the forefront of melodic/pitched sounds while relegating the PCM to percussion and sound effects. As the years went by the priorities shifted, and composers had to use it in ways it wasn't really originally designed in mind for. You can clearly see this shift over time from the early gen Neo Geo titles to the later ones, which use the FM for little else than bass
I'd have thought you'd know by now that the SNES was designed like shit.psycopathicteen wrote:I'm still baffled at why the SPC700 has something as complicated as Gaussian interpolation in it, if the silicon could've been used else where. How about being able to do that fancy multiplication inside the main CPU?
The maximum downsampling the S-DSP can do is $3fff / $1000 = 3.99976psycopathicteen wrote:The funny thing is that it doesn't even fix anti-aliasing on the last octave or so. If you have a note with a sampling rate of 128khz, it would be downsampled by 4, but in every set of 4 samples, the middle 2 samples will dominate over the other 2.
Indeed, but apparently GBA developpers were visceral about saving CPU time and battery memory. Many games preferred to use 10% of the CPU for sound and have awful quality rather than dedicating 30% and being on par with the SNES. This makes zero sense - yet this decision is almost consistent through the whole GBA game library from japanese developers.I hope not; that processor is more than powerful enough to mix sound.
Assembly was much less dead in 2001 than it is today. Smartphones weren't around and small embedded hardware still had limited memory and CPU capabilities. GBA sound mixing engines are typically coded in assembly.I bet assembly was pretty much dead at this time though like it is now, so I don't really know.
Well, PSG was widely used in the GBA, for the better and the worse.PSG had really already fallen out of style by 1990