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Sonic the Hedgehog for Game Gear uses 4-bit PCM audio for the SEGA sound.

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But it's played back using the square wave channels, right?

That's how the Digitalker family of codecs works, by treating voice as periodic over the short term. But in addition to periodism and 2-bit delta coding, it employs two other non-obvious (at the time) techniques. It changes the phase of each period sample to all cosines so that it can use a ping-pong loop (2x saving), and it silences the half of that sample that has the least energy (another 2x saving). That's how games using MX squeeze voice into 4 kbps or smaller at the expense of a bit of "robot voice". The developers of BBH&S probably didn't want the "robot voice" and were willing to spend a lot of bits to eliminate it.


Yes, and the PCM sample had to be stored logarithmically because of this.

Now I am getting a bit of a better understanding of how these PCM-based speech engines work. I've got the jist of how the sample playback works, but it is animating the character's mouth that I am wondering about.

Of course, accurate lip synching is not an overall necessity, considering that the sample playback requires 100% CPU attention. I mean, in Sesame Street Countdown, when the Count says, "'Ah, 'ah, 'ah! Find [number]," his mouth only opens three times. I'd love to find out how Hide & Speak manages to keep Big Bird's mouth moving during smaple playback.

Moving the beak during sample playback is as easy as updating a couple entries in a display list, waiting for vblank, and then blasting the display list to the PPU through $4014. This probably happened at the breaks between concatenated waves, seeing as all the voiceless consonants are stored as separate waves.

The rate at which the graphics have to be animated is pretty low. I'm sure there's some time between the output of consecutive samples to update some sprites and/or background tiles. In a mapper like the MMC3, that can bankswitch small portions of CHR-ROM, it would be even easier.

They probably sneak the mouth movements into the tiny tiny pauses during speech.

The most ridiculous attempt at PCM I've ever seen was Ultimate Stuntman. They used PCM sound for drums even during gameplay sequences. Quality often sucks. DMC would have sounded much better.

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Here come the fortune cookies! Here come the fortune cookies! They're wearing paper hats!

Most of the samples are broken up in such a way that facilitate animation. Here's an alternative dump with a pop between every individual sample.

http://rainwarrior.ca/projects/nes/Sesame%20Street%20-%20Big%20Bird's%20Hide%20&%20Speak%20(USA)%20div.wav

Notice, for instance, that "hide and" are together as a single sample, and as you might expect, he does not close his mouth between them in-game. Not sure why the alphabet letters are so broken up; I don't think there's any animation during them, really.

Also, this game is MMC1, if anyone's wondering. No special timing hardware was involved, it's pretty much all just cycle counting.

Dwedit, are you sure about Ultimate Stuntman? The NSF version is constantly playing DPCM samples in every track.

Yes, Ultimate Stuntman definitely uses raw PCM during gameplay as well.

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That's because Kevtris (the man behind th NSF format) converted the samples from PCM to DPCM when he ripped that NSF back in the good old early days of NSF ripping :)

Probably because about 10 of the consonants end in the "ee" sound so it can be re-used.

I know Michael Riedel over the net if you guys want me to ask him anything. Though he never replies to my messages anymore, but I can try. I remember mentioning this game to him and he didn't have a lot to say about it. I also know one of the programmers if you're interested, though again, he didn't have a lot to say about the game either.

I dunno, at this point I know everything I ever wanted to know about Big Bird's Hide and Speak. I can't think of anything I'd want to ask.

http://www.glitterberri.com/developer-i ... f-sunsoft/

Apparently Mozer ESS was used in Mito Koumon 1 and 2 for the Famicom as well.