SNES vs Genesis Sound Chip

DCurrent

DCurrent

Site Owner, OpenBOR Project Leader
Staff member
Instead of derailing the thread, I'm responding to this in a new discussion...

oldyz said:
stin,
MMMmm while i admit that Konami did what they could with the Sega genesis's musical capabilities, ill have to say that turtles in time Arcade's sound fonts have better sound - SNes version has the added advantage that it has stereo & even slightly better (compression rate?)

Gaaaaaa! - you know the HZ stuff

Add in the fact that most Sega Genesis musical scores sound so much alike across games  (its unmistakable) that when i finally had the game on my hands
i as a bit dissapointed its music was not better - which is weird because castlevania in the Sega genesis was not that bad with its music

Don't get me wrong , Hiperstone Heist  also has original tunes that i liked a lot too.

Now here is a crazy thing tho - the musical score can be such that Players Don't miss a thing - I wish i had much better musical skills,
but a thing that can be done is music that includes - mixes , goes to & fro the different sound fonts & styles -medleys that would be like:
let's say from the less powerful audio procesors to the best one
so you have a level that starts with the NES tune half way it starts to do stereo panning , turns to Genesis soundfonts then to SNES & finalizes with Arcade & then a final Hybrid. Most of the songs repeat aftor about a minute 45 or so, so at the most those background musical scores end up being about 7 min long.

But, as it is currently it's good enough  - The arcade's sound (tmnt & tmnt in time) fonts are the best choice from my point of view
Click to expand...

Which you like better is subject of course, but which chip is better? That's also subjective. On paper, the SNES is obviously better. It's a more advanced chipset with two years on the Genny. But that doesn't tell the whole story. The SNES chip was just a bit too forward thinking for its own good. PCM sound is the de-facto standard now, but at the time it wasn't cost effective at all without heavy compression. The SNES chip also forced Gaussian filtering whether developers liked it or not, and that made a bad problem that much worse. The musical possibilities are effectively endless, but they're all going to sound muffled and warbled.

The Genesis on the other hand packs in a good ole' YM2612. It's a simple little six channel synthesizer, but its quite versatile (and yes, oldyz, it IS stereo, it just happens that early model Genny's only output stereo to the headphone jack). It also happens to be the guts of more sound dev equipment in the 80's and early 90's than you can shake a midi tune file at. The Genesis does have a difficult timing interrupt scheme that few programmers can master. That's where you get gutter trash like Street Fighter Laryngitis Edition. But in the hands of an experienced or talented developer, you get Streets of Rage 1/2, Revenge of Shinobi 3, Shinobi, Vectorman, and so on. If you were really creative, you could even get the main CPU involved to pull off feats like the Toy Story opening theme.

Basically, with the SNES, you were guaranteed to have at least passable quality, but probably nothing great. Genesis tended to suck, but was unbeatable in the hands of a master. 

Again, it's all subjective, but don't ever count the Genesis sound chip out. It's the underdog, but does have several advantages over the SNES.

DC
 
If there's anything I have to say on the matter, I say it completely depends on who is handling the sound chip. You can have sound design like SSF2, X-Men on the Genesis, and most of Nu Romantic. Also, as talented of a composer as Tommy Tallarico is, his sound design is fairly rudimentary on the hardware. But then you have Streets of Rage 2, in general Yuzo Koshiro, Jesper Kyd's work, and the unreleased Time Trax. You also have the old sonic games, as well as Shinobi III.

On the SNES end of the deal, you have absolute garbage like Rocko's Modern Life, you have Home Improvement, Lester the Unlikely, and sound design as weak as something like Beavis and Butthead. However, there's also Plok, Arcade's Revenge, there's Super Adventure Island, Live A Live, Sakuraba's work on the hardware, and even Yuzo's other title, Actraiser. Also want to give a shout out to Foreman for Real on the hardware.

At the end of the day, both have their advantages and disadvantages. The Genesis, at first glance, seems like a worse sound chip, but it has certain things it can do easily that the SNES can't without a lot of trickery and manipulation. The SNES, on the other hand, can produce realistic sounds due to being sample based, while the genesis needs to have a bit of work applied to it in order to produce the perfect sound you want. All they need is someone that knows all of their limits, is willing to take the time to put forth the effort to get the best out of its sound, and has the imagination and technical skills to be able to pull it off.
 
Since you mentioned my favorite audio composer Yuzo Koshiro, I'd like to introduce you to his potential successor:


I noticed an impressive similarity in rhythm and audio effects, used by the master Yuzo.
 
stin -
Keeping myself intentionally ingnorant - this sounds like a streets of rage soundtrack -  i hit play & without looking at any info for the song i imagined a casino type level -

turns out the song its called gin tonic.  :)

I propose this:
lets use this thread to find samples of music OR converted music - be it SNES to Genesis or viceversa - or even wierder
to start Super mario world's ending theme:

Snes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNcIAC30mWI
Genesis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4z5VSESkxc
BONUS
N64 Banjo Kazooie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPJ_wr7Xt2A

@ moderators - is there a way to keep the youtube windows small? i have experimented & there seems no way to control it on this forum using HTML code
 
Damon Caskey said:
Again, it's all subjective, but don't ever count the Genesis sound chip out. It's the underdog, but does have several advantages over the SNES.

DC
Click to expand...

One thing i Always liked about the Genesis (original US model with the headphones jack) was its very VERY weird "realness"
let me explain - i don't know how many of you ever noticed - but at times it was like the Genesis had real "strings" inside it
if you suddenly reset the console or a game crashed you could hear the stringy-type instrument "vibrate" for about 10 to 20 seconds after the music was over-
another way to trigger this was to pull put the cartridge while the console was on (I am a monster)

it is this way that i discovered the hidden unused music for Sonic 3
i cant remember exactly , but i would do the debug menu code in sonic 2 & then insert sonic 3 while holding down reset- somehow this would allow me to have a sonic 3 debug menu with a bunch of music i did not recognize.
turns out this was used for sonic & Knuckles later on

it is weird - i would also turn on the sega cd with sonic cd in it, i would go to the menu where the sountracks where & then insert any sonic game cart to play while listening to the sonic cd soundtracks (probably the reason why my sega cd does not work anymore)
 
oldyz said:
stin -
I propose this:
lets use this thread to find samples of music OR converted music - be it SNES to Genesis or viceversa - or even wierder
to start Super mario world's ending theme:

Snes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNcIAC30mWI
Genesis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4z5VSESkxc
BONUS
N64 Banjo Kazooie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPJ_wr7Xt2A

@ moderators - is there a way to keep the youtube windows small? i have experimented & there seems no way to control it on this forum using HTML code
Click to expand...

I think it's a good idea. :)

This is the initial theme of CoolSpot - Virgin;

Snes:

[YouTube]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SrOpYmupMQs[/YouTube]

Genesis:

[YouTube]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AdIyE9TQnYk[/YouTube]
 
stin -

As Mr David Letterman would say about the genesis version
"beautiful Drums"

the stringy instruments would have been better -

But the Snes was badly  handled in this case -

I wonder if there are other versions of this game on other consoles or gaming computers

& THose giant video windows still bug me
 
Sorry, no way to auto reduce YouTube. You can try to manually insert an iframe, but SMS may filter it out.
 
Just a question:
I remember that some cartridges had a DSP chip included on the ROM game it working in parallel with the SNES processor. Could it to increase the sound quality or the music and sound quality will depend of  others things like amount of output channels used?
 
Birnbaum said:
...
Click to expand...

Sadly no, this is why the Genesis sound chip could often outperform the SNES even though SNES chip is technically far more advanced. You can add chips to do any sound work you like, but no matter what you produce, it still has to pass through that ugly Gaussian filter before getting output.

DC
 
Well - without any technical background knowledge ill say this:

the gaussian filter could be said to serve a purpose in some cases - in fact if im not mistaken, its what makes some SNES have this "feel" where the music has like a 1940's epic movie score quality...
tunes that come to mind (using real hardware - no emulation) are some supermetroid scores, the yoshi's island fortress tunes, some supercontra scores (especially that one that sounds exactly like a Rambo type score)

Damon Caskey
any idea of the true purpose for the filter?


and to continue with the musics: (this one is kind of unfair- Snes sounds more realistic)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aM4TB19tPw&feature=youtu.be

but points for Genesis for reminding me OF good old soundblaster 64

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTzqZl_5JIU
 
TMNT 4 - Technodrome Snes:

[YouTube]https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ddl3vDFC-3M[/YouTube]

TMNT THH - Technodrome Genesis:

[YouTube]https://youtube.com/watch?v=KwTy503H7Ys[/YouTube]

TMNT 4 - Star Base Snes:

[YouTube]https://youtube.com/watch?v=3M8mrARmWws[/YouTube]

TMNT THH - Star Base Genesis:

[YouTube]https://youtube.com/watch?v=IXEa7K3tmkc[/YouTube]

Because my favorite soundtracks.

-----

TMNT TIT Alleycat Blues Arcade:

[YouTube]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WIE-rCHky6c[/YouTube]

TMNT 4 Alleycat Blues Snes:

[YouTube]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8gNUPllu514[/YouTube]

TMNT THH Alleycat Blues Genesis:

[YouTube]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8fkwyArS59c[/YouTube]

For me, the best version is the one for Genesis.
 
Technodrome -
it sounds more thechnodromy on the SNES - Plus the Electric guitarr riff is iconic- the only thing i would change is to give the "seinfeld" guitarr or base sounding  thing a boost , not so much to the Genesis level, because it would be too overpowering - maybe power the drums a bit more too, but not too much

Star base -
Again SNES has Better over all sound - Things i would take from the Genesis are the Turtle shouts & the very faint Female chorus that MAYBE only i can hear from 0:35 to 0:40 -
the Seinfeld twang thing , maybe that too but not so strong

Alley cat Blues - I disagree a whole bunch on this one -
the Genesis is too simple for me -It is Loud but, it only seems to have just 3 to 5 instruments at most & the arcade sounds like a more polished Genesis version (the arcade capture is not that good either)
But The SNES main instrument is weird & fits well with the turtle games (accordion-mouth organ-eklectroguitarr thing)

That said  - i wish there was a way to take all of the 3 alley cat blues version's soundfonts & give them to a musical master that could combine them into one -
a "lazy approach"
that i would do is this - I would use a Dynamic Score - Each turtle has its own personality so the Game's music would be dominated by the turtle who has the most life or Highest score.

Since Donatello is the Nerdiest - his music fonts would be the & 8 bit NES & SNES
Rafael would have the Genesis - Sega type 2 fonts
Leonardo would have 2 OG's arcade fonts
And Mike would have - 80's Synth wave instruments, Hip Hop, Or Surfer Dude type fonts

Now for any of those that are not familiar or Are not aware of this type of Music The N64 had the best examples of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JAcswUJAFE

& if you where not aware its Ok, i really discovered how stereo sound worked at more than 10 years of age with Castlevania 4 's swinging candelabra :P


 
the problem of the Snes version, for me, lies in the non-accord, in the non-juxtaposition of the instruments, in non-linearity and in non-melody.

It seems to be listening to a music score, created by novices.

I repeat, in any chip, there can also be a thousand channels, there can also be all the Bitrates you want and all the audio effects you want, but if that chip, you don't know how to exploit it, you will have the result of a mess.

From this result, the Genesis and the skill of the Konami programmers comes out as the winner.

The sound is more incisive, more engaging and more rhythmic.

Which does not happen in the Arcade and Snes target (which I judge the worst of all for how the sound chip was used)
 
oldyz said:
Damon Caskey
any idea of the true purpose for the filter?
Click to expand...

Sure thing.

Preface: When I speak of sound quality, I'm talking about the sound output itself, NOT musical composition, creativity, etc.. Don't confuse the two.

Gaussian mathematics are used more for image processing, but they can apply to sound too. I'm paraphrasing bigtime here, but the general effect of a Gaussian filter is to smooth the edges of a given signal. This has the effect eliminating outliers in the signal, at the cost of detail.

In practical terms for audio, it eliminates popping and static, but effectively blends sounds together. Because the SNES is using heavily compressed PCM, the Gaussian filter is pretty much a necessity. Without it, the music from any standard cartridge would sound like a scratchy vinyl record or a badly compressed .wav file (which makes sense since that's exactly what it is).

In short, the Gaussian filter gives crappy samples an illusion of higher quality, only they are played back through a sponge.

So why can't you up the quality with support chips? Well, the SNES compression and filtering are done at the hardware level, not software. That alone makes sense. Hardware is always faster than software. Besides that, a programmable sound chip capable of high speed filtering and decompression would easily double cost of the whole console, and very few developers would know how to use it. So that part of the engineering was pretty smart.

Where they screwed up is that developers can't bypass or disable either one. So even though you might use bank switching, co-processors, or whatever else in the cartridge to add bigger, better, sound design, your final output quality is always the same.

If it helps, think of it like sound channel limitations of the Genesis. It has six channels, and therefore can produce exactly six sounds at one time. No more, no less. No matter how matter how creative you are or how many tricks you might employ to hide it, there are six sounds at any given time and that's it. Same deal with SNES output quality. 

Side note: The SNES has similar limitations (eight channels), but sampled sound allows infinite complexity since the sound chip is just using a channel to play the recording back. That's the whole reason SNES went the route it did to begin with. It's trading quality potential for complexity potential.

Side, side, note: Since it can play sampled sound effects, one might wonder why the Genesis chip can't use sampled music too. Well, it can, and there are several games that do it. Here's one example. The difference is the Genesis does not have the SNES hardware decompression or filtering, and IIRC only one channel is dedicated to sample playback. So to make it work you either tax a big chunk of the main CPU, or include a stupidly expensive cartridge.

DC
 
[quote author=Damon Caskey[/quote]

So to make it work you either tax a big chunk of the main CPU, or include a stupidly expensive cartridge.

DC
[/quote]

But also no.

Only 4 Mbit = 512 Kbyte of cartridge.

[YouTube]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yHX2M6xHXnI[/YouTube]

[YouTube]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jst97PtZHlw[/YouTube]

Guarantees also to Technosoft's skill.

In addition, I add a greater understanding of the SEGA hardware, by the various programmers and developers and, in additional, with the BlastProcessing software technique.

Thanks to this technique, they had direct access to the DMA and they could take full advantage of the hardware and a completely programmable and versatile sound chip.

In Snes, on the contrary, this was denied, a very difficult machine to manage, very little documentation and a Nintendo that behaved like a dictator, as far as I can remember.
 
stin said:
the problem of the Snes version, for me, lies in the non-accord, in the non-juxtaposition of the instruments, in non-linearity and in non-melody.

It seems to be listening to a music score, created by novices.

I repeat, in any chip, there can also be a thousand channels, there can also be all the Bitrates you want and all the audio effects you want, but if that chip, you don't know how to exploit it, you will have the result of a mess.

From this result, the Genesis and the skill of the Konami programmers comes out as the winner.

The sound is more incisive, more engaging and more rhythmic.

Which does not happen in the Arcade and Snes target (which I judge the worst of all for how the sound chip was used)
Click to expand...

I'm not sure - at first glance they all sound the same to me - the only difference is the instruments -
altho i do kind of see that the Snes sounds a bit more robotic & the Genesis version sounds more like a "live performance"
very slight tho...

Only way to find out is to overlap them - altho with the arcade version, it seems that the music is accelerated.

I noticed  about a day ago, that for some reason arcade rips uploaded to youtube are faster than what you hear on actual game-play videos.

The arcade music versions that i used to restore the original tunes for NightSlashers from youtube are faster - & i only noticed it because i watched some of the OG's videos & the music is slower, even in the switch. I consider it a happy accident ,  Since "deadwind" sounds better & its more tolerable with a bit of accelaration.

Either way
IF it so happens that after you match the speeds & overlap them (the turtle themes) & there is no cohesiveness, it would indeed show that the scores have rythmic differences at the very least.

If that is the case it is another clue that shows the SNes game was a rushed job.

Or another cause for this might have to do with what Damon mentioned - even tho the SNES sounds like it has about 10 to 14 instruments going on, the fact that one channel has to "host" 2 or 3 instruments at the same time might limit the possibilities of the composition.
On the other hand if we where to separate all those instruments, then there would be more flexibility.

Other reasons if there is a difference - its a different Musician, Or if it was the same musician he had the obligation to do a better job because it was pretty much the debut of Konami on the Genesis...

Damon Caskey

He he - if the intention of the filter was to eliminate the Vinil type crackle, it did not seem to work with me...
Now that i think about it , the best way to describe the SNes sound is that someone is playing music trough an old timey Phonograph -
& it serves as an advantage at times.

Donkey Kong's music comes to mind - I like the Snes renditions better than the "clean versions" - DKC is the only game that would make me fall sleep while playing, & music played back on phonographs has that "sleepy" quality to it.

next post  - more musical comparisons & a cool experiment with emulation...
 
More Music
Simon Belmont's Theme
this is mostly  in quality/ chronological order with a little exception:

Same game , bit it had 2 different musical options:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l96VhgYHzR4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGcT-ejAtao

The snes version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuqWGn8b1wo

A Genesis soundfont version of the SNES version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm7sT87AXFA

The official Genesis version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9oy5G7yemg

Honestly  - in this case the only version i can say it's inferior is the first Sharp example
all Others Hold their own & are unique, even the Unofficial Genesis re-creation -

The best one for me is the SNES - because castlevania 4 still is my favorite castlevania. The music matches the graphics & old movie atmosphere.

The second version of the Sharp's comes in second for me - it is way more advanced than the SNES version & it matches the game well, but that game was a bit too colorful at times.

The rest are also perfect matches to their games, & honestly i like them all.

Now for the experiment - if you download the emulator for the sharpx68000, you will see that the emulator offers a midi output option:
If you plug actual MIDI cables to a synthesizer keyboard from your PC,  you can enjoy a "different" version of the Simon Belmont theme -

sometimes with funny results - i had this keyboard that would have gunshots fire off during the playback & it also had a different output if you turned off & then on
on anther keyboard the drums where tribal

And on another the theme had maraccas  ;D 
 
stin said:
...
Click to expand...

Those are great tracks stin, but they aren't samples. They have sampled effects mixed in, but that's not even close to the same thing.

I grew up with a Genny and IMO the SNES has some seriously bone headed engineering in it. But objectively, the SNES sound chip is designed for PCM and the Genesis chip is not. You most certainly do have to get the main CPU involved or use upgraded cartridges to make it output full pcm tracks.

DC
 
Damon Caskey,

Yes, we agree on this.

At Nintendo, they wanted to run to compete with SEGA (MasterSystem vs Nes, of course the former was far better than the latter), but they created hardware with a copier's CPU, a Sony-derived soundchip and ridiculous dma / memory.

Here in my opinion, the increase in memory of the cartridges/addition of dsp chips for Snes is explained, this, not only for complete audio tracks, but also for some more animation frames and larger game backgrounds.

An example may be that of a Super Street Fighter 2, which on Genesis was much more successful as a conversion from CoinOp. (including all animations, even the opening one)

oldyz,

Yes, there are idiotic youtubers, but for their bad luck and my luck, I have an ear to understand what the original musical times are, having played in hardware and not in emulation.

Note: in addition to the audio chip of Genesis and Snes, there was also a Paula audio chip, a wonder for audio quality.

An example of multichannel (to overcome the limit of the four channels), with the software technique, was a Turrican 3.

Note2: Obviously, what I personally consider the best way to exploit the Snes sound chip cannot be missing, thanks to the Factor5 guys.

[YouTube]https://youtube.com/watch?v=yYUwzPMO0bM[/YouTube]

All 8 channels are exploited and squeeze the chip with regards to audio quality.

I have never heard better audio than this in Snes games.

----

Example of a sound track, which simulates a sound track created for the Genesi chip and reproduced by the Snes chip;

Original Genesis version - Never Return Alive:

[YouTube]https://youtube.com/watch?v=XFcdQObbT8o[/YouTube]


Snes arrangment Sound Chip - Never Return Alive:

[YouTube]https://youtube.com/watch?v=_LKMQuARkDw[/YouTube]

Caution; I recommend to read the explanations of the author honguito98, in the YouTube link.

In which he explains why it was very difficult to work on the Snes audio chip.

And in fact, once again, Yamaha was the favorite of composers and programmers.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom