To those who think the Megadrive's sound chip is dodgy...

[112]

I really liked the eternal champions music, although some of the speech was a bit scratchy, overall it sounded decent. IIRC Dragonball Z on the MD had a decent soundtrack.

112

[Phar]

Really nice video for good examples of digitised speech on the Megadrive, it's starts off with playing the ****e ones for you to have an idea of how good they can be in the right hands.

[noobish hat]

Was that Mako saying "I cannot believe it" in Dynamite Headdy?

[randombs]

I've been fiddling with the SOR2 music (ripping it out of the rom as gym files and then recording each channel as a separate wav file) for some super remix I'm planning (but will probably never do at this rate) and it's interesting how they're made up.

Almost all the songs I've tried so far have two or three channels that sound like Master System (probably use the MS sound chip, if it was in the MD which I imagine it was). In some of the songs (like stage 3 aka Dreamer) the MS channels are quite prominent, actually.

Yuzo's a dude.

The thing with the MD, though, what sort of effect would playing a song like the Guile remix in the OP have on the MD? I'd imagine a mixture of available memory and the cpu and whatnot would've had a big part to play? Just like how tech demos for consoles look ace because the machine isn't busy with AI and other such fripperies...

[JazzFunk]

Crude Buster/"Two Crude Dudes" Level 1 theme:



Ghostbusters (boss fight, especially that twinkly blast of jazz at around 0.28s):



I also think the music for the cartridge version of The Terminator was beautifully composed, I actually used to listen to the BGM on its own on numerous occasions, sad twat that I was/am/was/am.

[Fragmaster]

Heh that Ghostbusters vid is sort of Frank Zappa'ish.

[samanosuke]

The thing with the MD, though, what sort of effect would playing a song like the Guile remix in the OP have on the MD? I'd imagine a mixture of available memory and the cpu and whatnot would've had a big part to play? Just like how tech demos for consoles look ace because the machine isn't busy with AI and other such fripperies...

I'm guessing the Z80 would take care of it. Knowing TmEE, it's probably not CPU intensive but I could ask him over at the Sega-16 forums if you like?

[Fastware]

[QUOTE=JazzFunk;1532529]

Ghostbusters (boss fight, especially that twinkly blast of jazz at around 0.28s):

[\QUOTE]

Oh yes, that's a geat tune!

[Team Andromeda]

Two Crude Dudes feature stunning music , good shout I was also amazed (at the time ) with it's near Arcade perfect graphics , God those were the days .

Altered Beast featured fantastic high quality samples , more so on when you kill the Boss and its busts into the smoke bubbles , and the "Welcome To Your Doom". And not many go on about the game , but Pete Sampras Tennis 96 featured some of the best quality sound samples on any 16bit consoles , and if anything was just as good as Super Tennis , Greatest Heavyweights features great sound samples too .

I think the major trouble for the MD, was when it had to play Multiple sound samples , which it just couldn't do

[randombs]

I'm guessing the Z80 would take care of it. Knowing TmEE, it's probably not CPU intensive but I could ask him over at the Sega-16 forums if you like?

If you could it would be quite interesting I think.

I remember reading the tech specs for the N64 and seeing something along the lines of each sound channel using 1% cpu so you could have any number of channels up to 100 (but then absolutely nothing else!). I wonder if things like samples in the music instead of straight Z80 synthesising would require more cpu to process.

[Silanda]

If you could it would be quite interesting I think.

I remember reading the tech specs for the N64 and seeing something along the lines of each sound channel using 1% cpu so you could have any number of channels up to 100 (but then absolutely nothing else!). I wonder if things like samples in the music instead of straight Z80 synthesising would require more cpu to process.

The N64 didn't have a dedicated sound chip, everything was done in software eating up processor time. The way I understand it is that samples on the MD will use cpu power as they are handled through software, since it doesn't really have any sample handling capabilities. The FM Synth is handled by the YM2612 though, so there shouldn't really be much cpu work needed for that at all.

[samanosuke]

I asked TmEE if his Guile remix caused any extra overhead on the CPU and this is what he said:

The sound engine uses absolutely all the power Z80 offers, 68K is not required to generate sounds at all... it only has to set up the engine and tell it that now its time to play a song or sound effect. There is slight performance hit on real hardware (abuot 5%) due to the engine accessing ROM a lot (~50KB/sec) and thus interrupting 68K slightly, but its starts messing things up when you do extremely percise raster effects and the like, in other situations, it will not have any meaningful effect.

[randombs]

Thanks for that samanosuke! Maybe TmEE is simply a better composer than whoever was in charge of MD SF2's music, then?

[Team Andromeda]

Thanks for that samanosuke! Maybe TmEE is simply a better composer than whoever was in charge of MD SF2's music, then?

There is nothing wrong with the MD music for SF II, in fact its a lot closer to the Arcade than the Snes version, the sound effects weren't bad either . It was the Sound samples that hurt the MD version, but given the MD had I think only 1 channel for sampled sound , its was pretty good programming to get the MD to handle simultaneous Sound samples

[yesteryeargames]

There is nothing wrong with the MD music for SF II, in fact its a lot closer to the Arcade than the Snes version, the sound effects weren't bad either . It was the Sound samples that hurt the MD version, but given the MD had I think only 1 channel for sampled sound , its was pretty good programming to get the MD to handle simultaneous Sound samples

The SNES Street fighter music and sound effects are far better than the MD versions.
I especially love the music in Super Street Fighter 2 on the SNES