@RouteRoadGames toy story devs figured out how to use 4 channel amiga mod files on the megadrive but very down sampled..

The problem was memory size not processing power

And the fact that tiido's driver here takes up most of not all of the z80s time. Leaving no room for sound effects to be played while playing music at this sample rate

needing more cart space for higher quality samples is true, but its actually the other way around with the example. the ROM space of Sonic 1 is 512KB, and the ROM space of Sonic 3 is 2048KB. so the SEGA chant of Sonic 1 being 1/16 of 512KB is 32KB, but the SEGA chant of Sonic 3 being 8% of 2048KB is 163.84KB

@@Bentastic64 Well, also 1/16 is aprox 6,5%, so actually 8% is more percentage also.

Compression, it’s depends on the type of codec that they go with.

The point is that back in the day, memory was exhorbitantly expensive. Most of the original games were only 4 megabits, and even at the end of the Genesis life cycle, still the average game was 4 Mega. Companies really had to be able to justify larger games with increased projected sales and/or higher prices to warrant a larger cart size. And the fact that no games utilized anything close to this kind of wizardry (the closest being Toy Story, which doesn’t sound anywhere near as good) indicates it wasn’t a priority.

Very true, but they are both from the same master source recording. Taking it directly from Tempo it could never soind any better than, well, Tempo.

You mean Task Force Harrier EX.

@Despatche No, they mean Vapor Trail. Like most of the Titles Data East published for Genesis, the sampling is phenomenal. Chelnov Atomic Runner is another one with fantastic samples.

Z80 actually

Adrian Gauna Oh, and did you know? 4-channel PCM music is possible on the Mega Drive.

Albeit still in mono.

Somehow I missed this video until today. It fits right in with another one of my favorite YT vids, Savaged Regime’s “Rundown on Genesis Sample Quality”.

Give me the roms please

came here because the game sack´s guy told me to do it lol

It's a remix of Earth and Sea from Shenmue II

Jotaro Joestar www.joeredifer.com/crap/Tempo_Theme.BIN

The Genesis can’t do stereo samples. The YM2612 plays samples through its DAC channel, and it can only play them mono. While it is possible through software tricks to play more than one sample at once (EA’s programmers got it to do 3 or 4 simultaneously), it still always had to be mono. It was also possible to play samples using the PSG, still mono. That said, I believe both the Sega CD and the 32X had samplers that allowed for multiple channels.

@@nathandaniels4823 Yes it can, it's just hard panned to one side at a time. There are many examples that are easy to find. So if it had 2 hardware channels that could play samples you could tweak volume and pitch either for 100% l/r or something in-between. But of course it doesn't so I was thinking about it wrong there... 4 years ago? lol. The PSG used in the MD is mono, that's correct. In the Game Gear they made it stereo so it could probably be done as a mod, though it would still interrupt the whole chip to play a sample I believe.

To clarify, even though the DAC can play left, right, or both channels, it’s still a mono sound. The DAC takes up one of the 6 FM channels(I always forget whether it’s channel 5 or 6). Clever programmers get multiple samples to play at once by software-mixing the samples to one sample before it’s sent to the DAC. I don’t even think you could change the hard pan of a sample mid-sample; I *believe* the sample has to be designated as left/right/canter *before* it plays. But even if I’m wrong, I do know that no matter how many samples are playing at once, they will have to come out of the same single channel.

@@nathandaniels6757 It's channel 6 (some documentation calls the first 0 and the sixth 5). Technically true if it was just that one channel in the chip, yeah. No you can change it mid-sample I'm pretty sure, I'd have to double check in deflemask for example.

@@Alianger Do you get what I'm saying though, that even though you can play multiple samples at once, they're still considered one channel? The result is that you can't have one sample coming from the left speaker and another coming from the right. I was hoping the same thing before I learned this, because I had an idea to create smooth panning of samples, but it doesn't work. It *will* work with regular FM channels though: take two identical patches, hard pan them to opposite speakers. Create a volume envelope on the left speaker, and as it reaches half volume, start the envelope on the right speaker. Once the left speaker hits full volume, reverse the volume envelope. Once the right speaker hits full volume, revers its volume envelope. Not the best description, but what you'll have is a sound come from the left ear, travel smoothly to the center, and then to the right ear before fading out. But yeah, this won't work with the sample channel.

It's an arranged version of "Try to Star". I believe it's the level 3 intro.

oh you found it, thanks

This video is about what the Genesis CAN do. That's it. No need to get so upset. Here's a better version of the video. I bet you won't get upset at the very large SNES examples... you know.... just cuz. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/aatoobVl3pq1pmw.html

I’m with you…except that they didn’t lack knowledgeable composers back in the day, it’s just that a lot of the games that were pushed Stateside were US developed and most of those weren’t composed or sound-programmed well. Composers like Hiroshi Kawaguchi, Matt Furniss, Hitoshi Sakimoto, Masaharu Iwata, Hikoshi Hashimoto, Kazuo Hanzawa, Kenichiro Isoda, Mieko Ishikawa, Chris Hülsbeck, and of course Yuzo Koshiro, all produced brilliantly fantastic music.

xboxgamerJ16 exactly

Because you can't put in a CD quality song and a game in the genesis because the song takes to much memory

Also at the time when the genesis was released (in 1989) CD's weren't very practical for anything, (because of the price of disk drives) let alone game consoles.

It’s not CD quality. It’s mono and about half the sample rate as CD quality. When you talk about Pier Solar, are you talking about the CD Version, or the cartridge version? The cart doesn’t use anything close to CD audio.

@@nathandaniels4823 the cart version can utilize music from the cd as long as the soundtrack is in the sega cd add on.

In 11050khz mono, the Mega Drive can handle over 6 minutes of this in 32 megs.

Mostly they were crappy because devs didn’t prioritize sound programming respective to other game elements.

Genesis PSG can play 4 bits samples. The 64 KB audio RAM in SNES can not be overcome by bankswitching, sorry...

Jeff Van Dyck said in an interview that his sound programmers at EA had figured out how to get up to 3 or 4 samples playing at once. If you listen to Skitchin’, they don’t really use FM synthesis at all. It’s just the Sega PSG and samples.

The real butchering of Genesis samples comes from game devs pushing audio down in terms of importance. Most devs decided that audio was less important than other elements. Take Sonic, for example. The original game used a 68000-based sound driver, so the audio samples sounded really clean. With Sonic 2, they used a Z80-based driver because they could keep the 68000 doing other things. The result is that samples sound a little worse. Sonic 3 was even worse, and then you get to games like Ristar, which were beautifully composed but the samples sounded like they went through the garbage disposal.

Carsonj13 It is