Genesis Soundchip=Rock Music?

[Neon Streak]

Before I start this thread, I'd like to wish everyone on this site a Merry Christmas. Hope your holiday was filled with cheer and presents.

Now, on with the thread:

As a fan of video game music, I've listened to the sounds of both the SNES and the Genesis and IMO they have their strengths and weaknesses. However, when I go to different forum sites discussing which soundchip is superior, the one thing people say is "The Genesis's soundchip is great for composing rock music". Huh?

I could never understand how that's possible. Sure, techno music I can get by, but...rock? How is rock music better-sounding on the Genesis than on the SNES? From what I listened to, it sounds horrible-especially the 'guitars'.

IMO, as far as video game rock music goes, I believe it sounds better (And more realistic) on the SNES.

[Skyla Doragono]

They're probably mistaking the psuedo 16-bit sound (best example I can think of is "Best Friends -OPMaze Ver.- from the Persona Q Sound of the Labyrinth special disk) as the same thing as the Genesis sound chip. Needless to say this is not actually the case.

While Genesis did have the superior sound chip, it often wasn't utilized correctly, and we still ended up with the same blatted out garbage that you could get on the SNES. I think only a handful of games made good use of it, like Disney's Aladdin and the Sonic games, and... I believe B.O.B. and the ToeJam and Earl games. This is pretty much the case with the majority of Sega's hardware: good tech used bad.

[Koh]

Just listen to anything made by Yuzo Koshiro or Technosoft to know what they mean.

Streets of Rage - Stage 8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5vpIpj2pHc

Streets of Rage 2 - Dreamer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogHpm0BwCPU

Revenge of Shinobi - Chinatown
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5OCfGgEtqk

Dragon's Fury - Main Table (For funsies, compare it to its NEC PC Engine Counterpart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHCCoNyNFtY )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_DnpZdJ_yY

Dragon's Fury - Omake 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-D3T2LsrY0E

Thunder Force 3 - Gorgon (Same as above, but with its native instruments)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcWRpJJLtpY

[miyabi95_]

SNES's soundchip is pretty much the equivalent to a PC's MIDI output, where it tries to emulate real instruments to the best of its ability. This probably being why the three Rockman X titles get high praise for their soundtracks, as they're basically 16-bit rock/metal. I can say that they wouldn't have that same effect if ported to a Megadrive soundchip, unfortunately.
My best guess is that the Megadrive soundchip went for a more hip-hop/R&B-sounding effect, as shown by games like Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Toejam & Earl. Therefore, the rock/metal effect produced by the SNES soundchip would be harder to achieve for the Megadrive soundchip.

[Dolphman]

Another good example would be the music from the sadly unreleased game based on the TV series, Time Trax.

As you can hear, it uses sounds that emulate guitars. Tim Follin composed this catchy piece and the rest of the game's soundtrack.

[Gors]

>"While Genesis did have the superior sound chip"

No. Not in the slightest.

Genesis used a fork of the popular yamaha synthesizer, the YM2612.while this family of ym chips were used a lot in arcade boards, it is still a primitive technology compared to snes SPC700.

As sega kinda sucked with hardware creation (see all those weird add-ons for the Genesis itself), the ym 2612 was an amalgam of the chips - the ym synth board, the DAC sampling and PSG oscillator that is used in master system. As they are all separate chips, composers had to program each one of them to make music, which was troublesome - and some quirks didn't allow DAC to play in unison with all ym synth channels or use the white noise generator without distortion under certain circumstances.

The snes SPC700 had 8 identical channels and could emulate any instrument via sampling - once you sample all you want, you can make music without fearing impediments of any type.

So you can prefer the Genesis chip and all, it is indeed a capable music synth. But to say it is superior to the spc700 is saying that windows 98 is better than windows7 purely because of preference, and not the features.

[Skyla Doragono]

It's not a matter of preference at all -- my SNES got much more use than my Genesis ever did. Perhaps I am remembering wrong, but the Genesis did seem capable of better sound output to me, generic chip or not, and there are already some good examples in this thread.

[Gors]

by better sound output you might mean sound frequency. Since YM 2612 is a synthetizer, it is able to produce waveforms with 44khz natively. The SNES on other hand, can play 44khz samples - but in order to save memory, they're usually saved in 38khz or something like that. Some games like Earthbound dared to include 44khz samples in some music (it's a sample heavy game after all).

But otherwise the synthetizer will never achieve a sound similar to the real world instrument - all you'll get is a good enough imitation.

[Kosheh]

It's funny because Gors and I were talking about this just 3 days ago. I'm serious. 3 days. And he made me listen to Genesis and SNES version comparisons of the same song.

It's funny, because one of the examples he brought up was Rock N' Roll Racing.
Since I can't find really nicely organized examples,
Here's an OST collection of the Genesis version of the game.
Now that your ears are on the verge of bleeding, here's a playlist of the SNES version's OST. It sounds like synthesized sex in comparison.

I'd say that the SNES' sound processing beats the living pants off of the Genesis', as he literally just said above me that the SNES is able to play sound samples and then be played on any one of those sound channels, so it's bound to just sound better. The Genesis, on the other hand was a bit of a beast to program for (not to mention I'm pretty sure its sound tech predates the SNES as well) so you're always gonna have rough sounding, raw sound - but it's always going to sound kind of flat in comparison.

The most comparable sounds you're gonna get is like, bitcrushed samples on the Sega Genesis. Still one of my favorite songs to this day to come out of a Genesis is probably from TMNT Hyperstone Heist...but it's not very...rock-sounding, like at all.

Also I'm not sure if linking to a Konami game is cheating when talking about music since I'm pretty sure they had custom sound hardware in their cartridges :/ (also those fairlight orchestra hits are like crack)

edit: oops sorry if it reads like im suckin up to gors. na we just talk about nintendo beeps and boops a lot

[Omegajak]

Rule of creative thumb: Never give credence to anything in the past because people can do more with old technology then the best of the best at the time. I.E "Steve Jobs is a creative genius." No. he was philanthropist, opportunist, and advertising genius and that last word could be used loosly he was just the one who was in the best position to present a lot of technological first that weren't really first.

Megaman X Remixed using Genesis Sound chips from someone who actually knows what they're doing.

Essentially the same link but the REST of Megaman X's ENTIRE sound track to Genesis chips


SNES chips are better. SNES can produce overall better quality sound, easier. <- Key Word right here.


Sonic Ice Cap Zone recreated to SNES Sound chips. Good song, but overall the boom and bass are non-existent I don't feel like a cool snarky Hedgehog who's better than other people but is a cool guy about it anyway here.


Conclusion: both were very capable SEGA's staff just had different priorities and technically speaking? Inferior tech. Still, pretty impresive to have a system becuase comparably trash to yours but it still suck up market share. I wonder how many people at SEGA were hazed at Nintendo after the buy

[BullockDS]

The only thing is, those Genesis MMX remixes are most likely terribly inaccurate. The description for the intro level one states that it's made with a MIDI from elsewhere, and chances are the MIDI would have more sound channels than the Yamaha sound chip could produce (six channels IIRC wheras these MIDIs, at least the best-sounding ones, usually use well more than that).

[Gors]

Not only that - snes styled fan remixes will often be worse than it would be because they won't create samples from instrument recording like the snes sounds devs would do. Those remixes use samples from other games and 99% of the times it will suck because for example, mega man x3's samples will not work with toejam and Earl for example.

Not to say they simply run a pre-made midi on a sound lib instead of doing arranges with the correct number of channels and frequency.

[Kosheh]

I wonder how many people at SEGA were hazed at Nintendo after the buy

....wait, what? Nintendo never bought SEGA. Nintendo had contracts with SEGA for exclusive publishing rights on three Sonic games (and one of those have been broken already)

I don't know how contracts equate to full corporate buyouts, but SEGA's still alive and kickin, between owning arcades in Japan and having enough money to have actually purchased Atlus.

[Omegajak]

I wonder how many people at SEGA were hazed at Nintendo after the buy

....wait, what? Nintendo never bought SEGA. Nintendo had contracts with SEGA for exclusive publishing rights on three Sonic games (and one of those have been broken already)

I don't know how contracts equate to full corporate buyouts, but SEGA's still alive and kickin, between owning arcades in Japan and having enough money to have actually purchased Atlus.

Oh, I always figured SEGA retained all rights and properties but were now licensed by Nintendo kinda of like parent company or something. My mistake. Also I guess the honest truth is the SEGA was just an inferior console in every way.

[Gors]

Yeah, in honest truth, Sega Genesis is like a basic pack of legos, and SNES is like those professional lego kits. SNES is objectively better and has much more room to develop music for - but in the end, it's the artist's skill that will dictate the best use of each piece.

In other words, the tools don't make the artisan.

Now that this has been made clear, let's get back on topic - Rock music on Genesis. As proved here, Genesis can make good rock music as seen in Time Trax. But it's an unreleased and the 'one of a kind' game composed by veteran chiptune artist Tim Follin (he is famous for composing NES games Silver Surfer, Solstice, and - guess what - SNES game Rock n' Roll Racing). There are no other game with such guitar instrument/modulation quality and this makes me believe it is extremely hard to program the synth.

Let's break up the channels for both game consoles!

* SEGA GENESIS
** Channels: A B C D E f 1 2 3 IV
Total: 10 channels

A B C D E: YM 2612 channels. These five channels behave identically to each other - they're the main core of Genesis music. Each channel has 4 ADSR oscillators that when combined, produce complex sounds.

f: YM 2612/DAC channel. This channel is also part of the YM 2612 and acts identically to the channels ABCDE. But it can also reproduce DAC sampling. Basically, it can playback short .wav sounds, such as voice, drums and effects. However, the quality is really low. You can use only DAC or YM 2612 at a time, using both at the same time is forbidden.

1 2 3: PSG oscillators. These three channels are square waves locked to 50% duty cycling (you can found those in full use in Master System games). As they're primitive and rough compared to YM 2612, they're often used as backing chords in Genesis music.

IV: PSG noise oscillator. This is also part of the channels 123, but it produces white noise instead of square waves. It is used as percussion in some games. It has a limitation that it cannot reach its full range if all PSG channels are being used at the same time.

Other data: YM 2612 channels can be panned left or right for stereo music. However, it's either full left, middle, or full right, with no smooth transition between panning.

The "SEGA" choir in Sonic the Hedgehog is a DAC sample and it took up 1/8th of the cartridge space.

* SNES
** Channels: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Total: 8 channels

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8: SPC700 channels. They are identical and allows for polyphony. Usually though, games would use up to 6 channels for music and relegate the other two for sound effects. As they are sample-based, they can reproduce voice, drums, instruments and even groups of instruments (chords) at once. It can reproduce samples up to 44khz od frequency, but 32khz is often used to lower file size, giving them a muffled-ish sound.

Other data: SPC700 allows stereo surround music, and can smoothly transition from left to right.

Tales of Phantasia has a sung music with full-fledged lyrics, in addition to in-game voice samples for attacks and battle cries. This kind of stuff wasn't more common in the SNES because of space constraints. Namco managed to do it thanks to their own-developed Flexible Voice Driver, which could compress voice just enough to fit in a 48 megabit cartridge.