Was the sound on SNES better than on Mega Drive?
Nostalgia has been deceiving all these years! Strong confrontation between childhood and youth.
Zdarova, retro-band. Today I will try to convince you that SNES sounds better than Mega Drive. Eh … for me it is the same as pushing my childhood and youth with my foreheads. Yes, during the time of short pants, I had a megarave, with which several pleasant (and not very) memories were connected, but the real adventure began only with the advent of the Internet and the discovery of miracles of emulation.
And not computer Internet, but such an Internet!
And before that I heard something about SNES from someone, but I never saw and even imagined what games could be there. And this is in Moscow, where, if there is money, the most minimal ties and such and such a mother could be obtained or at least try almost any curiosity of the overseas entertainment market.
But all this is not about me, because for the first acquaintance with the 16-bit from Nintendo I had to wait already to the middle of the zero, when mobile Internet began to be enough not only for chats (4 rubles in 1 megabyte of traffic-as I remember now). And on the first acquaintance with Chrono Trigger, I realized that I would be linger here for a long time.
So, okay, stop indulging in memories. Cho. SNES. Able. This is important for understanding the context that in this 16-bit fool there was the same stupefied sound filling, offering an impressive assortment of opportunities by the standards of 1990.
So, the heart of the whole Snes’ov sound is APU-a whole system inside the system containing an audio chip, its personal central processor, DAC and data storage memory.
Yes, she is only an eight-channel that exposes it in an unprofitable light compared to the Mega Drive FM synthesis and inherited by the Master System, giving a tental sound in the amount, and how many channels it will turn out if the prefix is collected with all adds in megate, then I’m afraid to completely count.
But! This is a sampler. That is, these are eight channels of pure digital sound, which can later be mixed as you want. Where to find the sounds from? Yes, even go outside and write down if the tools allow. Or a piece of vocals to digitize, as Yasunori Mitsuda made here. Those who played Chrono Cross, the track will seem painful to friends. =)
Radical Dreamers – The Girl Who Stole The Star
And SNES is also a kind of synthesizer, since it has a function of modulation of the tone of one signal to another – a very primitive form of operator synthesis. It was rarely applied in practice and mainly for the sake of turning sound effects into something inhuman, but any opportunity to make a third of two sounds is not only cool, but also economically.
It looks in words, of course, wonderful, but we all know very well how the “typical Snes” sounds … like a tambourine from under a bucket. And the problem in the main bottle neck of such a powerful system is a shortage of RAM. The one who designed the APU – and this, for a moment, the folder of the future PlayStation Ken Kutaragi – was not entirely in the mind, deciding that 64 kilobytes would be enough for all musicians.
This rice grain needed to fit all the instruments of the current track against the background, all sound effects, as well as the code that operates with game music. And, and if the composer wants to use the Echo effect in some kind of tool, then he will have to somehow cram into the same memory.
And although the task of fitting something serious in 64 miserable kilobytes seems impossible, everything was not so hopeless.
The memory is operational, because in it you can not only change the instruments and sounds when changing game locations, but also load new data “on the fly”, resting only on the restrictions of the cartridge. Here you are, a full -fledged vocal main topic in the game on SNES. No addons, no super-chips. Just someone was not sorry to ditch a bunch of place for the whole thing.
But not all developers wanted to mess with the chips of the Snes’ov audio system, therefore, when trying to fit everything necessary in the ill -fated memory restrictions, the most important thing suffered – the quality of digital Semlov. Another problem for small studios of one and a half students – and where, in fact, to take seven?
If you are Hiroki Kikuta or Tim Follin, then the stump is clear that you are stubborn and write down everything yourself: you will pick up a mountain of musical instruments (or not the most lousy synthesizer), digger a bunch of material and adapt the result under the framework of criminally limited RAM SNES-APU-and most likely, get the descendants that the descendants will be called the best of the best of the consol.
David Wise immediately comes to mind, but it’s enough for me to say Aquatic Ambiance and Stickerbrush Symphony, and you yourself will listen to these tracks in your head from memory. And so the composer Jeremy Soul began his career:
Secret of Evermore – Staff Roll/Introduction
His first work in the industry, https://goldenpharaohcasino.uk/ with which he immediately flew to the top of the sound of Snes.
Ocean generally at the official level considered the significance of high -quality music primary and caught any cool game composers. In the nightmare Water World, according to the film of the same name, Dean Evans squeezed out of SNES, perhaps the most reliable and pure sound of the guitar, which you can only hear on the console:
Waterworld – Map
Only super -brothers of the follics rose to the comparable level:
Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge-Title
And check how the brother is swayed by the next track!
Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge-Briefing
Less crazy authors took what they gave the Nintendo themselves along with the developer’s instruments, which is why many soundtracks on SNES sound a little … well, the same. There is a poor halter under the orchestra, there is a poor halter under the orchestra.
But this is already with SNES cliche. However, this does not mean that no one tried to do something else. For example, electronic.
And suddenly a console Sempler here feels not just better, but right at ease. Still, the sound of entire orchestral sections itself is very rich in details, and it is difficult to conceal so that it climbs into the frames of SNES without severe losses, but the electronics have fewer such problems. And who is our dad of game electronics of the 90s? Yuzo Kosiro. And so what he showed on the SNES:
Super Adventure Island – Big Zen
But personally, my favorite is Justin Sharvon, who, as it were, is not against lingering symphodes, but he pulled them on top of the vigorous rhythm-section and so beloved by demo scenes of an arpeggio effect, which is why something that would be in the sum of some kind of crack on her background.
Vortex – Voltair
I prefer to shut up on this, otherwise we are so crawled into the very deep jungle of the Snes’ov musical and never disperse. I hope I managed to tell (and show) that under the hood of a simple gaming system worth 199 of the then dollars lurked one of the most advanced sound fillings of the early 90s-a powerful and functional.
But only in the hands of those who were not too lazy to try over music a little more than the necessary, Snes gave out truly impressive results, close to the CD-Queens. MEGA Drive operator synthesis, of course, is also remarkable inside his own capabilities, but he could not just technically jump beyond their borders, without resorting to the help of the Semlov and Addons. And with seeds and adders and without operator synthesis, this is no longer quite Mega Drive ..
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APU SNES is certainly more technological, but I do not think that MD sounds worse. I remember someone on DTF compared the YM2612 with the Soviet Polyvtsi. The sound is very saturated, but very distorted – hard and dirty, to part techno or metallo. Metal and YM2612 Actually Fit Like Hand to Glove. Try Metal Squad from Thunder Force IV.
Most of all in YM2612 delivers corporate dystorshn, the “staircase effect”, as the audiophiles called it. For example, he can be heard in the “Moon Sonata” from a sequel about Jim’s worm. And this effect has been used more than once when creating the soundtrack Portal 2.
I was at the time I was struck by the Ophenic of Tales of Phantasia. And all due to the fact that the vocals were present in the opening. Vocals in ophening games on SNES! This is generally a dump of everything. It was almost the only game on the console with a voice in ophening in principle, in addition to “Down the World: Mervil’s Ambition” and “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers”.
You can thank for such a technological miracle you can have a frail Hatsushibo, who came up with Flexible Voice Driver. The system allowed at high speed to change the played samples. This made it possible to divide the vocals into short excerpts of 2-4 seconds and on the fly to substitute them over MIDI music.
I am still amazed at the ingenuity of the developers of those times
I don’t really like music on the sega, even though there are also suitable saunes there, like in Streets of Rage. But to take, for example, the topic of the first level in TMNT: Turtles in Time on SNES and Hypertone Heist on Sega is the sky and earth. On the seg, you directly feel that this is a game from 16-bit, and the version with SNES at least in the animated series turn on.
And what kind of music was in “Demon Crest” on SNES, just a paradise for the ears ises 🏽 here also include music from megamen X. The Sega also had pleasant melodies, but not so saturated
SNES is more suitable for arqueary arrangements. Well, the sega is more rock. Therefore, chrono croses and finals feel great on SNES. On Sega is vectorman and road drive with motiks. Each taste.
I myself love the hard sound of a megarave still more. Some soundtracks are simply masterpiece.
Catch from me plus for the material =)
Well, the fateful OST Megaman X or the same Rock N Roll Racing sounds supercruto on Snese. And what is the sound in the port of the first doom … kreygasm
There are always exceptions, the point is in the composer.
Well, well, Snes could in guitars and in steep electronics! Just made rarely and not always good.
And in audio programmers!
It sounds beautiful however) And I thought the coolest and beautiful music on the sega mega DRIVE was. Entering the dune and the Vikings of what they only cost.
I propose to familiarize!
Demon’s Crest is very good, but I counted it too gloomy for the blog, this could not go in. I generally left a lot of suitable soundtracks overboard, t.To. They might seem a little specific. The same PLOK, for example.
On YouTube there is a CONSOLE WARS channel and there the best sound often gets Sege. And in one issue they rightly noticed that the music on the sege is more like a technodence (not like something bad).
And so, in fact, the question cannot be disclosed, because the track interface of writing music is evil. There was a dandy, and the music on it could only be written in the non -tracker, and it hurts. Everything is inconvenient, incomprehensible, crooked, obliquely. And then Famistudio came out – everything is clear, understandable, intuitively, and the functionality is exactly the same.
And thanks to a convenient interface, you can squeeze all the juices from the chip. Even I managed to write compositions that I had never heard on the dandy, because it is convenient … I even arranged full parties with her help, throwing romas on a flash cartridge.
And recently, the pogromists decided to make an ultimatic retrochiptyun tool and … this is again the tracker (Furnace Tracker). Well, what a fool you need to be to fan from them. They are uncomfortable and painful. I don’t want to read 450 pages of the manual, constantly keep in my head the difference between the ten and the hexadecimal calculus system, and break fingers and brains with the memorization of hotkeys if I want to change something in the track and experiment.
Until there is an analogue of Famistudio for demolition and sega, then there can be no question of any disclosure of the potential of their chips. Convenient Softina showed what to do normally – it will be normal, with its help such tracks wrote that it could not be on the dandy.
And most likely we will not see such a development, since the Creator said that it will be limited only to carried, and enthusiasts will be Furnace Tracker.