6:30 wow, I recognized that grating, high-pitched tone just as quickly as the wind itself! were early SNES emulators generally unable to do the pitch mod effect? That's the only reason I can think of that I would find that sound so familiar.

That pitch modulation example reminds reminds me of when I played FFVI on SNES9x around 1999. The wind sounded exactly like your demonstration of disabled pitch modulation.

The wind without the effects sound like a dental appointment lol

3:53 my head exploded at this moment

great video, as an SPC maker it was fun seeing it explained in a friendly way (as opposed to the 'readme's ive seen for drivers haha)

Hey, I absolutely LOVE that little countdown timer you use to tell people when a piece of onscreen text will be going away. I genuinely wish more KZfaqrs would include something like it.

I'm working on SNES programming right now, and the sound stuff was very hard to figure out (I knew the basics for a while, but the specifics on programming are a mess). I wasn't expecting this video to go much actually in depth, but you exceeded my expectations pretty quickly. Great work!

This is just making me think how much better and more space there as as an 8bit composer who has to deal with DPCM samples, amazing

Ahhhhhhh... I WAS WAITING FOR THIS~!! The inverse-audio thing is basically what allows surround-sound support in certain SNES games, as Dolby Surround back then took both channels and any waveforms that were literally inverse in one channel that is right-side up on another were instead put into the back speaker, while everything else was on the forward speakers.

6:29 Funny enough, when I played Chrono Trigger for the first time, it was the port on Final Fantasy Chronicles for the PlayStation. Any scene that had the wind sound effect playing pretty much sounded exactly like that.

The SNES Port of Prince Of Persia uses pitch modulation across the entire soundtrack, as well as vibrato.

Another incredibly high quality video! Also @ 5:39 I see my boy Teckworks has good taste as always :)

Also, side note about the 8 channel limitation: Although the snes could indeed have 8 stereo channels of sound, many games reserved anywhere from 1-3 channels for sfx. Typically these are channels 6-8, which is the format Super metroid uses, as playing a sample in channel 6 will play over a SFX that would be assigned to that channel

Interesting video, and shoutouts to retro game audio who have also talked about how it works in detail.

My favorite old school music is 16-BIT music. It has nostalgic sounding audio, and at the same time is advanced enough to fit into any genre

3:41 actually you can use this trick to create surround sound if you have the correct equipment to play it this example you give, in a surround sound equipment plays only in the rear channel some SNES games have sound made in surround, and some of them are very well made, like Secret of Mana 2

A correction about the pitch modulation. The OPL2 FM modulation and SNES pitch modulation don't work the same. The YM3812 uses phase modulation, not conventional FM modulation. This is why those FM synthesiser apps don't sound like a YM3812 or YM2151.

64KB isn't so bad - with smart use engineers squeezed out some amazing stuff. The most important part of most instruments is the attack. The "chuff" of a flute, the "pluck" of a harp, etc. These attacks are milliseconds long. The rest can be a tiny single cycle loop that can be pitch or volume modulated. Really clever engineers would create single cycle waveforms that contained chords, such as the organ in Plok. That maximized sample memory AND helped the music sound richer since it only used a single channel, leaving more channels for more instruments. (Crazily enough Plok used only 5 channels for its music!!) You could synthesize a kick drum with a single-cycle sine wave and a good custom audio driver. The most efficient way to do sound effects was to modulate instruments, controlled by the main CPU, which saved RAM on the APU by storing the sound effect data in main RAM. Earthbound did all of its sound effects this way, leaving more space for all those samples from pop music. (Also I think reverb wasn't used.) The hardest stuff to optimize are snares and hihats, which have a lot of high frequency content, so when you're listening to ripped SNES samples you'll often hear a barrage of blips and glitches and a couple of very clear drum sounds sticking out. On the reverse side, heavily downsampled snares sound good when pitched up, adding clarity to the mix - this was done in the Kirby games, Earthbound, and a Japan-only game Wagyan Paradise. Why do I know all this stuff? Listening to a ton of SPC music and being hobbyist game dev / musician... I LOVE optimization. I find it endlessly fascinating... the closest thing to magic.

The part about the inverse sound blew my mind. My phone is mono so I heard nothing, then switched to my tablet and bam, literally sounded like it was inside my head.

I see at 2:30 you are showing the C700 VST, it's a great tool for DAWs and gives a lot of info, but it's usually better for display purposes since most spc music can be written or decided to .It format

5:45 the SCSP (Yamaha YMF-292) in the Saturn (and its DreamCast variant, which may be different) has 32 operators that (with limitations) can modulate each other. Each operator is either put in sine wave or PCM mode.

I didn't understand anything but I can tell this is a great video

Interesting how the limitations seem to basically just be memory for SNES. This was never mentioned for Genesis, so I assume it was a non-issue?

The SNES sound chip was designed by Ken Kutaragi the father of playstation for Nintendo.

correction: 0.37 sec of 44100x16 stereo and 0.74 sec of 44100x16 mono

Inverting either left or right channel can make your Dolby Pro Logic decoder route the sound to the rear speaker.

Impressive work ! Thanks for the great video !

3:41 that's trippy, I thought you were joking but it made me feel like I needed to pop my ears.

I was wondering how to make that effect for years!!!!! The inverse wave effect. It sounds like behind you!!! 🤩

Great video! I'm looking forward to seeing more of your videos in the future. Subscribed!

Will have to rewatch this to understand everything better, but following that leap from the Sega Genesis to the Super NES, I hope you'll make one sometime to the Playstation 1. I came across the Rockman Complete Works soundtracks before (Shadow Man's theme was my favorite), which reminded me of how far superior to my SNES and Nintendo 64 the audio in some PSX games were that a friend of mine used to own, and couldn't help but think, "This would never fit into a ROMhack of Earthbound as a possible battle theme." (That's when I got the idea to aim instead for a whole new game from scratch.)

3:52 sounds bad on my headphones but after you fixed it it sounds way better

Hi GST Channel! I really love the information in this video, so I'll gladly subscribe! I'll be taking a look into SNES SFX Hacking for an EarthBound ROM hack :)

It's possible that the mudulation thing may have been used to some extent in Mortal Kombat 2 SNES's title theme?

The commonality of these consoles from the time: When the sound programmer on a game didn't give a shit, you could tell.

Excellent video! I love these so much! Its really funny how fm sampled waveforms on snes can work and sound much better than most regular sample forms lol. Yet there only 2 snes games that used them.

I like the new format of video!

wait so the SNES is capable of FM synthesis? The sound hardware is far more capable than I thought, then, even if it's only 2 operators.

I believe that the SNES could theoretically store a short loop of slightly muffled CD audio that would basically just sound like an MP3, but there would be no other room for other data in the game. Correct me if I'm wrong because I might not have any idea of what I'm talking about.

@6:12 sound almost like FFVI Narshe Intro noise

Hello from the future where RGMechEx has done one video on the SPC and intends to do more.

5:30 *gasp* Teckworks!!

the snes version port of super street fighter 2 sound very good

How did the Saturn handle FM? There's a good one to get your teeth into. :)

Oh god the moment I noticed it on my phone I ran full speed to my PC so I could listen with headphones because oh boy I didn't expect to see this today

Try to make a video explaining the modulation in SPC700, although it was very basic there are many people interested in knowing more about that. It is one of my most watched videos of my channel. On sound modulation, make some arrangements with SNESMOD dirver or custom sound by Mukanda, but it is far from exploiting the sound capabilities, as did the RARE or Square games sound engines.

3:53 DUDE THATS CRAZY! I listened to that music, then I went to my phone’s settings and switched to mono, listened again, and the sound was gone! That’s trippy as hell.

6:30 The sound of Chrono Trigger with early emulators in the late 1990s...

7:13 I miss this version of KZfaq where the sub count was not abbreviated. I know it's irrelevant but something to point out.

I wonder if that’s why some of the music in earthbound sounds weird in the GBA port.

Retro Gaming EXPLAINED has made a video about the SPC700. Also, I have a question just for curiosity: Why did you change your channel from Mega Drive music to Super Nintendo music?

Thanks man!

haha haven't even watched the vid yet but clicked Like as soon as that Mark Davis The Fishing Master Tournament Stage BGM started :)

Here is the real question: does the SPC700 player have default instruments or does everything have to be manually sampled ?

That wind sound without the pitch shifting. Old emulators didnt do that correctly, back then? Explains why the sound effect of Megaman X, when he collects a new power up and throws his fist in the air sounded so wrong on emulators back in 1998.

We finally arrived in the future.

Hello, I have a 1chip outputting very low audio from the dac converter that goes low all the way to the rf and composite, caps measure all good, voltages are ok, my local tech says he's never seen such problem, do you have any idea what could be causing this(tested on different tvs various cables and jumpered everything tried all possible fixes with jumpers)

hey! i don't mind the muffled sound. but not all of the snes games voice clips sound muffled. if you have played super tecmo bowl on snes, they sound like they're in a hallway close to somebody.

i mean with his advanced after effects process it'll take a long time (and he said it'll be a second series afaik)

I'm having an issue with my Snes, when I play Street Fighter Alpha 2. There are music but I can't or don't hear the announcer or Ryu's hadoken sound effect. How much does it cost to fix it?

SNES has amazing sound!!! 🎉🎛🔉🎵🎮🤘🤩📺🎮😃🎧🎚🔊🎶🎊

can produce some wonderful soulful music

Speaking of samples, are there ways to compose CD-quality samples without taking too much space in the N64 ?

5:50 I really hope that "but better than this one" is about the OPL/OPL2 and not the OPL3

Great video, but I don't understand which one of the apu's 8 channels is yours tho, and why it's affected...

The pitch modulation thing really reminds me of LFO. Any relation here?

Link to Retro Game Mechanics Explained is broken

Where is the best place to find documentation? Was their any support for nes sound since many other aspects of the snes where backwards compatible.

Does anybody know that nice song @ 1:07

6:30 sounds like the engine sounds from the game Super Strike Eagle.

so interesting!

How do people learn these things? How does one get these technical documents and info about the snes

4:16 x86 assembly? You’re not saying you coded an emulator in assembly are you Because that’s impressive

What kind of sorcery @3.53!?... my ears feel funny when I play it

Woow you have things well explained,,the lowpass filter,for filter the and the reverb filter are interesting features,but i wish you explained more about the guessian filter,now am also curious how the snes turns those BRR/adpcm samples somewhat back into 16bit ,if game devs rather used lower quality samples,i wonder if they also could use 1bit & 2bit adpcm samples to save up more space,would be interesting,now likely with the flexible sound driver engine it was possible to get around the 64K limit by streaming sections of audio samples one after another to the snes,allowing for true & full 16bit audio quality👍

Wait, I heard some people say the SPC700 was a wavetable synth and some other people say it was a basic sampler. I'm confused. ¿Is it both?

I KNew HE WAS GONNA ZOOM IN ON A TINY RED LINE BUT i didnt want to believe it

3:58 I forget i use my phone in mono cause i keep one head phone in whilst at work and don't like that rock songs get split in half

I know that Sega Genesis can play full songs by transmmiting data from the main CPU to the Z80. Can the SNES can do the same thing?

In the end, making music for SNES is way easier than making Genesis music, imo. Even with 48KB RAM limitations. Or I'm just used to working with tracked musics (MOD, S3M, XM, IT) than FM synth sequencer, and granted I used SNESMOD to convert IT module to SNES-compatible SPC data.

i was always confused about the metal in porky means business

very cool

What is the software that are you showing at 2:30min?

Isn't that the wind from ff6 as well?

Mega Man X is the peak of SNES music

I thought it could also generated noise?

Retro Game Mechanics Explained has made the SPC700 video now, if you're looking for it(LOL): kzfaq.info/get/bejne/pJuVh7J4v8rShIk.html

Wow, the SNES sound chip is SEVERELY DISAPPOINTING! The Amiga's Paula audio chip is BETTER, and OLDER, too! I'd like to see the SNES attempt 14-bit PCM IN STEREO, to be honest!

imagine my shock seeing fucking Teckworks (furry porn artist) at 5:29

The SPC was quite something. Some games (mainly Capcom and Square) made great use of it. I legit wonder if it was possible to use it to replicate sounds from FM chips, like the Genesis'

4:15 The SNES uses a 65816 as its main CPU, not x86. Other than that, you actually have more in-depth knowledge about the SNES audio hardware than Nerdwriter1 does!

SFC v. MOD :P

Ah, the SPC700. A great sound chip, if properly coded. The 64 KB memory limitation explains why SF2 voice samples were restricted to less than one second. Looking forward for the next videos.

That shout-out was very well deserved, but it was incredibly clumsily executed.

I was looking up what adpcm was which the S-SMP uses. It's 'adaptive differential pulse-code modulation' which means it predicts the gaps in low frequency samples and was developed by Bell Labs for telephony. The samples are initially 4bit and upscaled to 15bit. Although the S-SMP can output 16bit 32Khz but that would have to over only 1 channel. The frequency output is lowered by half for four channels down to 4Khz for all 8 channels running simultaneously correct me if I'm wrong. It will be tough to find interesting tunes on the snes. The low fidelity murders most music. The samples are such low quality. It is idiosyncratic, but the problem with too much noise, gaussian interpolation, reverb and echo make the catalogue less than stellar and pretty samey. Get used to a whole lot orchestra hits and breathy strings. Bah. Another handicap other than low memory the S-SMP (sound unit) had was it did not support mod file format. So you cannot compose a chip tune on the snes without first writing your own tracker program which is where alot of 16bit games get their distinctive music through the methodologies of tracker composition and use of the 'echo' effect to generate the fluttering sound. So alot of the music on the snes is composed on midi and as such suffers from a lack of expression and a plodding type of sound.

Switched from Mega Drive music to SNES music, that is depressed.

Coming here after playing Chrono Trigger

not x86 asm, gee

I hate all generic parts in this video because that used space could be used to talk more about the snes soundchip.

SNES uses Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation ADPCM which was designed at Bell laboratories for telecommunication and is highly compressed and uses guesswork to fill in gaps in the audio. The 8 point gaussian interpolation which is mandatory further adds guesswork to the gaps which at worst can sound completely insane. Samples are a bit 'depth' of 4bits (CD is 16bits). To use all 8 channels reduces the sample frequency to 22Khz (CD is 42Khz) but with just 2 channels you can have 42Khz and I think 6 channels can use 33Khz frequency. But the bitrate of samples is also variable from 22Kbps up to a maximum of I suppose 180 although I doubt anyone went that high. Samples are data heavy, compared to FM. Making music on the SNES was very challenging to say the least. David Wise said it took him 5 months to engineer just the underwater theme to Donkey Kong Country.