(Fan game) Sonic the Hedgehog - Nintendo Edition (Early WIP)

[miyabi95_]

The Gameboy uses square waves but not only square waves.
It's also got a triangle wave, noise generator, and DCPM but as far as I know the Game Gear uses square waves only so all of its music (the sonic games in particular) has this distinct "doot doot doot" sound to them because everything is just squares all the time.
I think most gameboy games generally had the main melody and accompaniment be squares while the bass and percussion were triangles and noise/DCPM respectively (but that doesn't apply to every game of course)

You'd probably be best asking Gorsal or someone more familiar with chiptunes how to give it the most authentic sound (particularly if this would have been a first party Nintendo collaboration, the music would have been really good).

On the intro in your OP for example, when the title screen comes up the first three beats you use an ugly buzzing sound when noise or DCPM would have worked much better.

I do notice the difference between Nintendo and SEGA's sounds. I've also played MSX games where they probably use the same sounds as SEGA.
Yeah, I don't understand why that buzz is in the soundfont.
Here's the soundfont I'm using: http://asialunar.info/gbsf.html

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Just correcting Vipershark right now: The game boy uses 2 pulse wave generatos, 1 custom wave generator and 1 noise generator. This means, the bass doesn't need to be locked to trangle waves, and you can create your own waveform to make music. Some games even inserted low resolution samples in it (such as Pokemon Yellow's title theme), but usually, it's just used for musical purposes instead of samples.

The most common mistake when people try making chiptunes is pretending that all notes are 50% square waves. While this is true for the PSG (Master System, MSX, Game Gear), this is not the same for the NES and Game Boy, which could manipulate their pulses to have different timbres.

That makes so much sense to me now, thanks a lot !
I'm starting to consider whether or not I should write the music myself, because right now I'm just using MIDI's written specifically to be heard as a MIDI (written by John Weeks, etc.). It'd take a lot of time, but it would make it more convenient to mimic the 2 pulse, 1 custom, 1 wave, format you're talking about for the tracks.