How did Japanese music composers write music for consoles?

[Anpanman]

The one that always springs to mind and I think it was mentioned in an article in Amiga Format was Operation Wolf, the cracking team removed the protection, reduced from two disks to one, put a front end on AND trained it - awesome.

[Hohum]

Tim Follin was mentioned earlier in this thread, so thought it would be worth posting this too:



Always thought this was great, considering how limited the NES audio chip is.

[Team Andromeda]

That Ecco track is amazing TA!

It is and Spencer Nielsen was just awesome on the Mega CD. Its complete tosh to say that western music wasn't up to that of the Japanese. Spencer Nielsen was somthing else on the Mega CD, never mind what came off the C64 and Amiga soundchips

[hudson]

I think we need an Amiga music thread as these are great trip down memory lane.

If anyone can help with the initial thread question, that'd be sweet lol

[ZipZap]

C64 demo scene > Amiga demo scene, but then I'm biased

Back to the original question, there's an interview with the guy who composed the Sonic tunes here:

http://info.sonicretro.org/Masato_Nakamura_interview_by_Sonic_City

He mentions composing them on an Atari (ST, presumably?), recording it onto tape, and sending it to a sound engineer (who I'm guessing was essentially a coder with expertise in the Megadrive's sound chip) who would create it on the Megadrive. Presumably, the composer would have a good idea of what the sound chip was capable of, so would base his compositions around those.

I'm guessing Sonic probably has a higher development budget most games though, so this might not have been typical.

[replicashooter]

I think we need an Amiga music thread as these are great trip down memory lane.

If anyone can help with the initial thread question, that'd be sweet lol

Peep this site out, so many familiar cracktros and tunes:

http://flashtro.com/

[hudson]

Peep this site out, so many familiar cracktros and tunes:

http://flashtro.com/

Oh man, thanks so much for this heads up. I've been thinking about making an intro like these from the Amigarrr hey days. It'll never happen, but would be cool. If anyone here can help do some pixel gfx for a mock up crack intro and possibly a spinning polygon shapely thing, that would be awesome. [MENTION=2447]EvilBoris[/MENTION] [MENTION=3985]chopemon[/MENTION]

[Team Andromeda]

C64 demo scene > Amiga demo scene, but then I'm biased

I loved the Amiga demo scene, the stuff that people like Magnus Hogdahl would do was isane. Amiga music also was just so good, same the sound chip couldn't really handle a number of sound effects and music to the played at the same time, but the music was amazing

Loved the Amiga and so wished I never threw it out (along with the ton games) just to make room

[Leon Retro]

I loved the Amiga demo scene,

Yeah, the Amiga demo scene was amazing at the time. It was really impressive to have music from a computer that sounded similar to stuff you'd get in the charts.

same the sound chip couldn't really handle a number of sound effects and music to the played at the same time, but the music was amazing

The sound chips in home computers back then were pretty limited in terms of possibilities. How did you manage to compose such a good music?

The Amiga originally supported only four channels. I was able to use seven. The trick was to mix four software channels into only one of the Amiga hardware channels. I managed to do that with some coding help by Jochen Hippel who already did similar things on the Atari ST. As a result, I was able to use the remaining three high-quality hardware channels for instruments with higher frequency content.

How many of these possibilities were documented by Commodore?

Today you would call it homebrew! Commodore wasn’t involved at all. I guess the original hardware developers were probably blown away when they realized years after what people were able to do with their hardware… it was a very interesting time.

It's a shame that some developers either had music or sound effects, when quite a few managed to deliver great music as well as sound effects. I really hate it when a shoot 'em up doesn't have music.


Here are some more excellent examples of Amiga music.

Lethal Xcess

https://youtu.be/D8B1BapyJQc?t=50s

Supposedly this game also managed to have 7 channel sound.

( A hauntingly brilliant end theme. )

The best Amiga music will always stay with me and continue to impress me whenever I go back to it. They were special days because musicians got to use a sound chip that enabled them to do things previous 8-bit machines just couldn't. It inspired creativity that resulted in lots of classic tunes.

[ZipZap]

I've been active in the C64 demo scene for about 25 years (shameless self promotion: http://csdb.dk/scener/?id=2293 ), so it's always my true love, but of course there are lots of great Amiga productions as well. The big thing for me about the c64 is that the hardware configuration barely changed. A production released in 2018 would run on one of the first C64 models out of the factory (PAL/NTSC differences aside).

And from the point of view of a pixel-graphician, AGA is boring

Here are a few modern SID sounds!











Some of these are from a rather great SID album: https://multistylelabs.bandcamp.com/...-love-classics

A couple of demos

Quite long, but definitely take a look at the scrolling intro logo and then the dancing stickman at 10:05...



Lots of nice effects, and ends with the C64's answer to State of the Art



All running on the exact same hardware you used to play Paradroid on

[hudson]

Dear God of video, please make the above videos work

[ZipZap]

haha I changed them to links, how do I embed? I thought BBCode was youtube in square-brackets, with the youtube id inbetween?

[hudson]

You just put the code after the last forward slash of the URL in. Using the provided YouTube button.

edit. sorry in the case of above urls. The letters and numbers after the =

[ZipZap]

Thanks! I think I had some html stuck between there, so it looked right, but wasn't! Working now!

[acidbearboy]

Red Bull Music Academy did an insightful series a couple of years back called Digging in the Carts. The videos are still online, along with a lot of added bonus content.

In episode 1, Junko Ozawa of Namco explains how she composed music, created waveforms (sounds) and translated the data for both into numerical data for the sound chip to understand.

http://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2014/10/diggin-in-the-carts-series