You can get some pretty convincing things with the wavetables, almost sounds like FM Synth:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q2PCmbeVTkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73lbaqwmmjshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5LvZP6sdAMhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Z7Pi8GnGYAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7COJzEjWRUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOWXaQaPVI4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEjy0K80j2Mhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYBXAfFJ2BEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRFgxap_iS4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsXJ5pPkAcghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJha25MH940So why didn't commercial games at the time sound like these? They were all just beeps and boops like the previous console generation.
>>11102185>So why didn't commercial games at the time sound like these? They were all just beeps and boops like the previous console generation.Then you don't know SHIT about the PC Engine:https://youtu.be/SgGG09C_u5Q?si=fKE1cKhBiqVr2JEKhttps://youtu.be/nHCCoNyNFtY?si=-IB50kXX-XjQ7rZ0https://youtu.be/-KtYL1D4xtM?si=_WD8BVgx1juQezeThttps://youtu.be/A6jjosPMa-Q?si=Y3wlhmwaFwb8Idkdhttps://youtu.be/DzAIRdGTPDY?si=d84krDXvF5u3k2Ufhttps://youtu.be/LlJfnW5Rms8?si=DMxyHOSYuh3SnRRa
>>11102198All of those are beeps aside from the choir(?) in Devil's Crush's main theme
Because the PCE was RAM starved, and storage starved. Anyone who wanted to make good music just used the CD add-on, the HuC6280 just didn't have the chops for it after you factored in running the game too.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBe04qkd018https://youtu.be/qNSKOxdKVwk?t=108
>>11102198why do people post AI images?
>>11102198>normal gameNothing to see here, goyim!
I'm not sure I fully understand the distinction OP is making but anyway here's some neat PC Engine musichttps://youtu.be/tS39o9Qke4w?si=678c2lGkhEW71Wd6&t=130
>>11102480not everyonehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jcdiSG1uVIalso people should stop sucking off FM so hard
>>11102621PCM with CD samples hardly counts as the stock setup. The reason this game uses fairly low quality audio is because it's dialogue heavy, so they needed the CD audio for that.People like FM because it was less shitty than cheap samples, and far more musical when used right. The PCE has pretty good sound hardware, but really it's only good in comparison to how much of an abomination the SNES was after their chip became worthless when the CD add-on deal fell through.
>>11102650>PCM with CD samples hardly counts as the stock setup.Alright then, how about these?https://youtu.be/ObdgR8crNoA?si=cz1--JaysOU4GemG&t=45https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jFYp8wnS-8https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cgxk1RkK7EEhttps://youtu.be/jqpZp-kONuc?si=d0A_wXKbbVDIMUl_&t=37https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wsc8xpR-cAQhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYaNh-BK63Yhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZPiES7Umx8
>>11102714That Dragon Saber music sounds impressive but the rest are more traditional beeps and boops
>>11103012How is FM not bleeps and bloops?
>>11103056Comparing the waveforms between a commercial PC engine game and one of the OP links should enunciate the difference:https://youtu.be/y_dTBSzwAKchttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73lbaqwmmjs
>>11102185>almost sounds like FM Synth>almosta lot of these tracks use samples of fm synth instruments but still sounds like a shitty dac.>>11102621>also people should stop sucking off FM so hardcope.>>11102714> Hana Taaka Daka!? nice>>11103063>Comparing the waveforms between a commercial PC engine game and one of the OP links should enunciate the differenceare you trying to suggest that sampling an fm synth is actually better than the real thing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nCsnbN84ZI
>>11103909>sampling an fm synthOh so this is done in software? What's all this wavetable stuff then
>>11102185The PC Engine's meagre 8KB of RAM probably played a part. I imagine there's simply too much memory overhead from storing all these complicated wavetables
https://youtu.be/goXSMn4MlZk?si=TnNcgSkkj_c1cjAz&t=168
>>11102650>PCE has better audio than the SNESWhy is this board so contrarian heavy? Is it because you get banned from retro games forums for being annoying and have nowhere else to go?
>>11105094The SNES has one of the worst soundchips ever put in a home console, and I'm tired of retards acting like it was good because Rare made a few decent songs with it.
>>11105103Yeah that's the kind of thing I was talking about. Deep down on some level you must realise that you're talking out of your ass.
>>11102185Shantae
>>11103063>>11102185You realize all these various covers are someone using sounds and bits from pre-existing stuff as patches and then grabbing (or recreating) MIDIs of songs and placing the new sounds on top with careful arrangement, right? It's not real hardware, and while smart arrangers can still work within the limits, something like Deflemask even being capable of doing Genesis-accurate sound output that can play on real hardware, these aren't real?
>>11102185>So why didn't commercial games at the time sound like these?there arent even 300 hucard games. only so many were developed, lot of them low budget games1943 kai has sampled drums that sound greatSF II has very clear voice samples
>>11105298>It's not real hardware, and while smart arrangers can still work within the limits, something like Deflemask even being capable of doing Genesis-accurate sound output that can play on real hardware, these aren't real?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20JFsCcjlm4
>>11105103It's just Sony's stripped down version of a Gravis UltraSound, what's so bad about that?
>>11104004>Oh so this is done in software? What's all this wavetable stuff thenit's literally on same level as chiptunes on the commodore amiga but with more channels and has proper stereo. basically:> sample whatever instrument at reasonable sampling rate for that hudson chip> cut to size and loop fundamental wave. if you're good at it you can create incredibly small and convincing instrumentsyou could get away with using really decent sounding looped waves. quality of longer samples like drums etc. was usually sacrificed when it came to sound quality by sampling them at reduced sample rates to save memory. that's basically all there is to it in pc engine music. the custom drivers used in games would have functionality for envelopes, vibrato, etc.
>>11105103>The SNES has one of the worst soundchips ever put in a home consoleit's excellent. if you want to blame someone for the sound quality of some of those games you need to send your thanks to shit musicians that didn't really know what they were doing or send your condolences and apologize to those poor bastards that were stuck using the worst tools imaginable and forced to shit out a soundtrack for a chip that had documentation written in gibberish translated english. developer's software for the snes' apu has been consistently dogshit since its release.
>>11105405If by stripped down you mean having an eighth of the sample space, defeating the entire point.>>11105472It's sample based with a laughable amount of RAM (32kb).Could it theoretically do some very fancy things for 1990? Sure. But it's like bragging that your favorite athlete in the special olympics has some really cool looking crutches. You still can't compare him to a chip that wasn't crippled.
>>11102203except the orchestra, drums and bass in batman you mean? best track he posted anyway. too bad they never followed up with that style on pce
>>11102185https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhQyMWq9jkghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47kFsn9LuVIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2CJPskN6gc&t=116
>>11102480storage, maybe. but not ram.large amounts of ram are mostly used for decompression buffers on old consoles like this. most, if not all of your code sits on the cartridge, unless it's self modifying.plus, streaming a sample from hucard to sound wave ram is generally just a single TIN instruction (transfers from an incrementing address to a non incrementing destination, and you specify the size).
>>11105056nahsee my post here>>11105712I think people overestimate the importance of ram in these old consoles. vram? super important. work ram? for the most part it holds variables. you want enough, but it doesn't have nearly as big of as effect as rom size.>>1110569164KB actually. and with decent compression for the time. 3.5:1 ratio. so 64KB holds around 3x that in terms of raw 16-bit PCM. the main problem with the SNES chip are how it's connected to the rest of the system. the transfer speed is so slow that almost no games even tried streaming samples in. the other issue is the heavy filtering, but that's something you can work around.there's actually a bunch of cool but real esoteric tricks you can do with the echo buffer, fir filter and pitch modulation. but they probably don't count here since they were used rarely to never in the 90s.
>>11105697>>11105081Why are you retards posting CD music like it's some spirit bomb of a counterexample
>>11102185What you've linked OP is just PCM audio, and since the PC Engine had no hardware support for sample playback, this all falls on the CPU which is obviously very taxing; I don't think any commercial game had more than two simultaneous PCM channels.
>>11105747yeah it did bro. you just flip a a bit in one the sound control registers.maybe you mean it doesn't automatically load samples in by itself like an amiga, sure I guess.it's really not super taxing though. you have a timer interrupt specifically for it, so you don't have to count cycles like shitty genesis pcm. or worry about bus contention ruining playback quality.There are some pretty bad examples though from back in the day. Air zonk allegedly uses a almost 1/3 of the cpu or more on a garbage pcm routine.
>>11105752>it's really not super taxing thoughMore games would've used it if it weren't. And as you've pointed out, Air Zonk, whose soundtrack mainly relies on PSG, still used 1/3 of the CPU for PCM audio lol
>>11105764yes, because the routine wasted tons of cycles.the reason pcm wasn't used more would mostly have been the large size of samples.you can stream the same or higher quality samples in multiple channels using about the same amount of cpu as air zonk does, and the examples of this are not too hard to find online I've written one myself, though mine wasn't very fancy, 13khz in 1 channel. But it worked and was pretty simple to write.
>>11105717>64KB actually.Sample storage was limited to 32KB, the rest was used for instruction. You needed the other half of the audio RAM to tell the chip what to do, because the SPC-700 was isolated from the rest of the memory.Streaming in samples was only realistic with the CD add-on that failed to materialize. It would've been a pretty capable sound chip then, but the limitations of the hardware meant that it was a joke compared to its 2 earlier competitors.
>>11105785you're right that the audio code also takes space in the spc ram, but there's no 32+32 KB segregation. And the program code shouldn't take anywhere near half. I've used snesmod a decent amount and it doesn't use nearly that much. I think it was 10KB or less. The samples themselves use the majority.Streaming in samples was only done in 1 retail game as far as I know. But there's some homebrew in development that I think streams in samples for 1 or 2 channels on the fly.
>>11105791I guess it depends how complex your audio code is. I've never seen a good comparison of space allocation for the ARAM across games, I assume there was some variation between devs given most games have a different audio engine.Tales was the only game I recall using streaming, and even then it was only partial to get voice playback during a demo, probably one channel, the music was static. I don't really know if it'd be possible on the fly, even with an add-on. I thought they were interfacing with the audio bus in some way, but it's much simpler than that, they just bypass it and use the on-board for what it was intended for, simple sound effects and backing.
>>11105379There were near 700 CD games tough.
>>11105887You're thinking of the HuCard + CD total number
>>11105717>and with decent compression for the time. 3.5:1 ratioYou're saying that like it's some sort of advantage. The aggressive compression is half the reason for SNES games commonly having that muffled, tinny, lifeless sound that plagued the system's library.>raw 16-bit PCMBut the SNES doesn't play raw 16-bit PCM. It plays compressed 4-bit PCM. This is less than the PC Engine's 5-bit uncompressed PCM, and half the Mega Drive's 8-bit uncompressed PCM or 9-bit FM, and those systems are 2 to 3 years older. And this is Nintendo's "ultimate" sound chip?
>>11106089lmaopretty good bait but I think you're serious
>>11106089Any day now people will stop liking that dang dirty SNES. Just one more seethe post...
>>11106110Is the SNES really all that widely loved? In the early 2000's I would have yes, but it seems to have totally fallen off since then.
>>11102185>>11102198>No contra original
>>11106167If you base your opinion on /vr/? Yes because everyone here is a contrarian since its an effort free way to appear like they know what they're talking about. Literally everywhere else? No the SNES is still incredibly popular and one of the most well loved consoles of all time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8is3T-juZe0This is one of the best things the wavetable synth on the PCE has produced. Konami made good use of it too.
>>11105298most of them should play on real hardware, in fact, I've personally know or have talked with half of the people linked and they will only write music that will play on the real box.for example, i wrote a simple demo using this open source sound driverhttps://github.com/Turboxray/HuTrackAnd it played these 2 tracks fine (they gave me the deflemask source files). yes, on real hardware not just an emulator.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzvevjSovhkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Im62-tKND8
Which console From the 1990's would be ideal for me?>I hate Mario bros>I hate the NES>I hate Nintendo>anti-nintendo console>anti-pokemom games>console with anti-nintendo design>Anti-PC consoles>I hate MSdos
>>11102185>So why didn't commercial games at the time sound like these?Turnaround time for testing your novel sound driver was measured in minutes, not seconds. And erasing the EPROMs meant 30-45 minutes baking under the UV lamp so you were limited by how many spare chips you had for how many iterations you could test. 100% of the time all these "zOMG the $CONSOLE could look/sound liek that?!" is a result of someone with 2024 knowledge running hundreds of tests per hour by building and running in an emulator and then testing the most interesting experiments on real hardware with modern flash carts for rapid turnaround.And when you've got 30 tracks to create by the end of November, you can't afford to waste time trying to invent a FM emulation module that the programmer might say "sorry, that's like 30% of the CPU time, we can't fit it in." Instead you just lay down the tracks using a meat and potatoes driver, collect your paycheck and move onto the next project.And then 30 years later people outdo you for fun.
>>11105717>I think people overestimate the importance of ram in these old consolesBank switching adds enough complexity and overhead that it's never long before you start copying your working data to RAM for use. Beyond launch games usually data is not stored in ROM in native formats, so some amount of decoding/decompression to RAM before use becomes necessary.
>>11108309yeah, you're probably right. so they should have made more supergrafx games lul
>>11107071getting a different hobby
>>11108293maybe it was really uncommon but didn't some dev kits send stuff over serial to the console?
