#39054 - tepples - Sun Apr 03, 2005 11:00 pm
Based on this post, it seems ampz is a fan of the Commodore 64 computer's SID synthesizer. How do its capabilities compare to those of the GBA's GBC tone generators or those of the NES?
2A03: two pulse (variable duty), one triangle, one noise, one arbitrary waveform
GBC: two pulse (variable duty), one wavetable, one noise
SID: three pulse (variable duty)/sawtooth/triangle/noise (selectable), ring modulation, output filter
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Last edited by tepples on Mon Apr 04, 2005 2:20 am; edited 1 time in total
#39059 - Lupin - Mon Apr 04, 2005 1:20 am
why did you link to that icon?
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#39061 - tepples - Mon Apr 04, 2005 2:09 am
Must have right-clicked Copy Image Location rather than Copy Link Location. Fixed.
_________________
-- Where is he?
-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.
#39073 - ampz - Mon Apr 04, 2005 6:45 am
:)
Several games were made for both the C64 and the NES. Guess the music of thoose could be used for some kind of comparison.
Bubble bobble is one of them: c64 nes
Seems that site does not like deep links. The files are on this page: http://taito.overclocked.org/bbobble.html
Or you can add a space right after the above URLs.
Here is a list of what is cconsidered to be the best c64 sid tunes of all time: http://www.transbyte.org/SID/HVSC_Top100.html
Are there any similar lists for the Nintendo chips?
#39076 - FluBBa - Mon Apr 04, 2005 8:48 am
I'd have to say there are more good tunes on the C64 than the NES but there are a couple of cool tunes on the NES as well, I think it has more to do with the composers than the hardware (though the C64 is more advanced).
Codemasters has some NES games with "C64 like" tunes, also Solstice from Rare uses the technique with playing 3 (or more?) different tones on the same channel changing the frequency very quickly.
Also I just listened to the music in Racing Gears Advanced (I think was the name), some really nice music there, one of the songs seems like it's from The Last Ninja (though it isn't). Most got the feel of a C64 remix =)
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#39084 - ampz - Mon Apr 04, 2005 11:11 am
Are there any NES games with speech or other sampled audio?
#39099 - Kyoufu Kawa - Mon Apr 04, 2005 3:00 pm
| ampz wrote: |
| Are there any NES games with speech or other sampled audio? |
Yes, there are. Too many to list, but the japanese version of CastleVania III used 'em if I remember correctly, as did Super Mario Bros 2 / Doki Doki Panic.
#39142 - tepples - Tue Apr 05, 2005 3:40 am
Anyone who reads both gbadev.org and PIRACY-DOT-COM forums will know of Big Bird's Hide and Speak for NES.
Contra, Super Mario Bros. 3, Dr. Mario, and lots of other games had sampled drum kits.
_________________
-- Where is he?
-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.
Last edited by tepples on Sat Aug 05, 2006 6:20 pm; edited 1 time in total
#39149 - ImInABand - Tue Apr 05, 2005 5:32 am
The Simpsons: Bart VS the Space Mutants for the NES used sampled speech. Ironically i was thinking about that at work today. The game used two sampled phrases from Bart, used at the beginning of the stages "Cool man," and "EATMYSHORTS"
#39155 - ampz - Tue Apr 05, 2005 6:25 am
Ok.
Sampled audio on the C64 was kind of complicated, but some games used it (Ghost busters and Impossible misson for example). As far as I know it was not possible to play any other tones at the same time.
As I understand it, the SID had no explicit support for sampled audio, so what they did was set it to output a DC level, and then they played the sound by adjusting the volume :)
#39158 - serf - Tue Apr 05, 2005 7:25 am
Hmm ... I looked this up on Google, and there's a great article on sampled sound on the C64 here.
Apparently the 6581 had some interesting design flaws, among them that it tended to output a DC voltage by default. So, indeed, by modulating the master volume (4 bit register), you could indeed play sampled sounds. The article even suggests that this trick could be used in parallel with the SID voices, at the cost of some distortion of the SID voices, which could be minimized (at the loss of some sample quality) by using only the lower 3 bits of the master volume register for sample playback. The 8580, the 6581's successor, fixed many of the 6581's "flaws," among them the DC offset. (The 8580 could be modded in hardware to regain the DC offset, however.)
The same article describes (and another file elaborates on) a method for playing back sampled sound at even higher quality using the SID voices set to output pulse waveforms at frequency 0 -- though apparently you have to put up with a certain amount of ringing at the PWM carrier frequency. The more SID voices you use, the higher the quality.
If anyone knows more, I'd love to hear it -- I know nothing about the topic that I didn't just read in those two files.
#39160 - FluBBa - Tue Apr 05, 2005 8:25 am
| serf wrote: |
The 8580, the 6581's successor, fixed many of the 6581's "flaws," among them the DC offset. (The 8580 could be modded in hardware to regain the DC offset, however.)
|
Yep, I burned my original 6581 and had to replace it but they only had the new 8580 so I had to mod it to be able to listen to samples. If I remember right it had a sound in pin which you just hooked up to +5V through a resistor or so. The soundtrack to Turbo Outrun uses a lot of samples and normal SID voices at the same time, a good example of how things can be done on the C64.
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#39576 - ampz - Sun Apr 10, 2005 10:46 am
I converted both the C64 and NES version of Bubble Bobble to vorbis format so that you don't need any special SID or NES plugins to listen to them.
For your listening pleasure, I present:
The C64 Bubble Bobble tune.
The NES Bubble Bobble tune.
#39577 - Kyoufu Kawa - Sun Apr 10, 2005 11:01 am
| ampz wrote: |
| I converted both the C64 and NES version of Bubble Bobble to vorbis format so that you don't need any special SID or NES plugins to listen to them.[/url] |
Gentlemen, start your comparisons!
#39578 - Lord Graga - Sun Apr 10, 2005 11:13 am
Hmm.... the NES theme sounds a lot more smooth for my ears.
#39581 - Kyoufu Kawa - Sun Apr 10, 2005 11:57 am
True, but the C64 version is... what's the word... fuller? It's like playing the Fountain of Dreams level in Super Smash Bros Melee, then playing track 20 in the Kirby Nightmare in Dreamland sound test. Same song, different... fullness?
#39592 - ampz - Sun Apr 10, 2005 5:00 pm
For your continued listening pleasure, I'am happy to present:
The C64 North & South tune.
The NES North & South tune.
#39595 - tepples - Sun Apr 10, 2005 5:28 pm
All those samples tell me is that whoever converted North & South to the NES sucked at music engine programming. Likewise, whoever converted Dance Dance Revolution to the Game Boy Color sucked at music engine programming (evidence).
Here are better examples of what the NES or GBC is really capable of:
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-- Where is he?
-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.
Last edited by tepples on Sun Apr 10, 2005 5:42 pm; edited 1 time in total
#39596 - Kyoufu Kawa - Sun Apr 10, 2005 5:39 pm
Weee Butterfly! Strangely, it sounds better than what Konami did on the GBC. And I've played that.
#39621 - ampz - Sun Apr 10, 2005 8:36 pm
Tunes from games ported to both systems are good for comparison because it is the same tune, but as Tepples said, they do depend alot on the skill of the person who did the porting.
I like the Butterfly tune.
Two good C64 game tunes which are not available on the NES are:
The Last Ninja
Ocean Loader (well, not exactly a game tune..)
EDIT
I just read the readme.txt in tepples "evidence" .zip file.
There is a reason Butterfly sounds good. It is a s3m (mod) tune, not a NES/GBC chip tune.
While the instruments in the s3m tune are claimed to be sampled GBC instruments, I would not accept this as evidence on the capabilities of the GBC tone generator. I assume the same is true for the other two tunes?
#39636 - tepples - Mon Apr 11, 2005 12:24 am
| ampz wrote: |
I just read the readme.txt in tepples "evidence" .zip file.
There is a reason Butterfly sounds good. It is a s3m (mod) tune, not a NES/GBC chip tune. |
Only because I wrote it in an hour to prove a point for somebody on Bemanistyle.com forums. Even if I did have the time to write an appropriate NES/GBC based playback engine, I don't have a rewritable NES cart to test it on. Open it in Modplug Tracker and you'll see how it follows the constraints of the NES hardware to the letter.
| Quote: |
| While the instruments in the s3m tune are claimed to be sampled GBC instruments |
Open Butterfly in Modplug Tracker to verify this. The basic NES waveforms are 1/8 duty pulse, 1/4 duty pulse, 1/2 duty pulse, 32-step 16-level triangle wave, and pseudorandom sample-and-hold noise. Pulse can appear on channels 1 and 2, triangle on channel 3 (with no envelope), and noise on channel 4.
| Quote: |
| I would not accept this as evidence on the capabilities of the GBC tone generator. I assume the same is true for the other two tunes? |
Maxx Unlimited is also a .s3m file, but the tune from Silver Surfer is the first track of silversu.nsf from Zophar.net's NSF collection, played through Festalon.
If you want to hear more actual decent NES music comparable to the SID masterpieces, go to 2a03.org.
_________________
-- Where is he?
-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.
#39717 - FluBBa - Mon Apr 11, 2005 7:25 pm
So how much of the C64 needs to be emulated to play SID tunes?
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#39738 - ampz - Mon Apr 11, 2005 10:45 pm
| FluBBa wrote: |
| So how much of the C64 needs to be emulated to play SID tunes? |
As I understand it: Most of it (excluding the obvious stuff).
But the hard part appears to be to properly emulate the SID chip itself.
#39789 - FluBBa - Tue Apr 12, 2005 9:48 am
| ampz wrote: |
| As I understand it: Most of it (excluding the obvious stuff). |
It was a really long time since I poked around in with the C64 so I don't remember what "most of it" is... ;) some obvius stuff that should be emulated is ofcourse the CIA timers and some kind of vblank irq I suppose. So maybe something like this?
CPU, 6502
RAM/ROM
Sound, SID
Timers, CIA
VBlank/other VIC status stuff...
Ofcourse to emulate the SID properly you'd need lots of cpu power, but as a more or less working player for the GBA it shouldn't be that hard?
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#39849 - Dwedit - Tue Apr 12, 2005 10:24 pm
The MaxX ogg file sounds like it was taken straight out of Drymouth!
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#39850 - ampz - Tue Apr 12, 2005 10:36 pm
I'am having troubles getting Splam SID player to run on hardware... Is there anything I should know?
#51287 - tepples - Wed Aug 17, 2005 11:52 pm
| tepples wrote: |
| Only because I wrote it in an hour to prove a point for somebody on Bemanistyle.com forums. Even if I did have the time to write an appropriate NES/GBC based playback engine, I don't have a rewritable NES cart to test it on. Open it in Modplug Tracker and you'll see how it follows the constraints of the NES hardware to the letter. |
Better yet, now that an NES tracker has been ported to Windows, I've redone this track as an NSF.
Butterfly
Is that enough evidence?
_________________
-- Where is he?
-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.
#51356 - Kyoufu Kawa - Thu Aug 18, 2005 6:25 pm
| tepples wrote: |
Better yet, now that an NES tracker has been ported to Windows, I've redone this track as an NSF.
Butterfly
Is that enough evidence? |
What!? Where? Wanna trade for my Blonde Girl mix?