BEFORE YOU COMMENT: Please know my stance about emulating the quirks and flaws of original hardware. In short, I LOVE HOW THE HARDWARE ORIGINALLY SOUNDS. That's it. If I never made this experiment, I would have been recording audio straight from various hardware and saving them for my collection. I firmly believe that every hardware is unique and its individual quirks should be perfectly preserved via proper emulation, or better, lossless hardware recordings. Even if the Namco N163 sounds like crap, it's what it is, and it should sound like that. Now, for the people who say, "[the stuff I tried to do in this video] doesn't make it better". You know what? "Better" depends on the goal of the individual. If you're trying to say that "smoothing out the triangle wave doesn't make it better", then in the perspective of recreating the sound of the original hardware, of course that's bad. But for the purposes of THIS VIDEO, whose goal is to make an experiment and hear how the NES *could* sound like if its flaws were not present, then it doesn't matter. The NES is trying to make a triangle wave. However, a triangle wave does not have steps. I merely helped the NES achieve what it was trying to achieve. And the result was interesting to hear, so I shared my findings. I never claimed that "the NES should sound like this" or anything similar. If anything, I learned to appreciated the NES more-by fixing its flaws, I understood just how many sacrifices it had to make to even generate the sounds it can generate. Again, for the last time, I fully support the faithful recreation of hardware audio. I hope you understand. Feel free to continue writing your comment even if it is "you killed the NES and it will come to haunt your dreams". However, if that is the case, as writing and explaining the same thing over and over again is tiring, and there are other comments on different topics that could spark a more interesting conversation, I may not be able to reply to your comment. Please understand.

The jagged triangle wave was a product of limitted hardware capability yes, but the added bonus to that is that if the triangle were used as a bassline (which it very often was) those higher harmonics would help it to be more audible on the shoddy speakers most CRT TVs had back then. A straightup triangle would be totally lost on those in the lower registers.

It's crazy how a jaggy line is what makes the NES sound so definable. It sounds like a different thing all together

I think this is a clear example that “perfect” is not always better. I actually enjoy much better the roughness of the originals.

I’ve seen a lot of people arguing about how the composers used the inaccuracies with their equipment to their advantage, and something similar happened with plasma screens and old TVs. Lots of sprites from back then look loads better when on the screens they were designed for with the color fuzz and gaps in pixels. In some of the Sonic games they used the TV screen to take a unicolor waterfall sprite and when displayed on a TV, it got these even vertical lines of different shades of blue.

FM synthesis is the most beautiful thing in this world to me. It's a totally unnatural sound, a sound you can never hear in nature. It's one of the few things humans have created from whole cloth, without trying to mimic or improve on nature. My favorite sound is the OPN2, but the OPLL (and VRC7 by extension) is very closely related to it. I've never heard an OPLL as clear and clean as the VRC7 in this video, though. Thanks for this.

Pretty cool! Reminds me of how you can use a Roland MT-32 with various DOS games to get incredible sound that feels borderline orchestral.

for people wondering the name of each tune here: 0:00 super mario bros. 3 - water world, or, world 3 map; 0:51 fearofdark - rain dance; 1:35 journey to silius - intro screen; 3:31 akumajou densetsu - déjà vu; 4:24 akumajou densetsu - demon seed; 5:14 lagrange point - within the deep darkness; 5:44 fearofdark - the coffee zone.

Dude that FM synthesis song at the end is divine. I had no idea the NES was so capable of this great sound.

"The Coffee Zone" sounds so good. It's hard to believe something based on the NES soundchip could sound so clean!

I would love to see an option to toggle this on in emulators or trackers as an "enhanced" or "hi-res" option for people to see how it changes the music in real time. Especially on something like the FPGA clones that exist these days.

Honestly I like this style of editing. Subtle, toned down, focused, but informative, and relaxing with the finished product playing on the background. No excessive "try hard" stylization or special effects, and reading your descriptions instead of having them spoken to me allowed me to digest the information better. Thank you

Bro anti-aliased song 💀💀💀

Classic games were an artform. I'm sure most people like me really don't appreciate them until we see them broken down and how purposeful every bit of information had to be.

As a sound designer, this makes me appreciate how sounds inform composition. The pieces have a very specific character on the original chips that is missing with the improved performance - because the pieces were written to make those original chips sound as best as they could *with* the flaws. Then you hear the newly written tune at the end, and my god those upgraded chips sound f'n goood. Nice work!

I really appreciated this. I am a 57 year old, life long video game player, software engineer, synthesizer fan, hobbiest creator of electronic music, and lover of many of the old video game sounds. Nostalgia :) Of course there's a charm to the flaws of the sound generators in old electronics. But that doesn't mean someone can't improve on them if they like. I think there's enough room in the world for different approaches to the "old 8-bit music." I even attended this amazing video game concert once, featuring an orchestra, and other instruments. And of course, music from games like Zelda is being played in countless ways on youtube, and why not?

I wish I could learn how to make chiptune music like this. It's just such an amazing fusion of musical, programing, and hardware knowledge.

"I understand this video is rough and crude" This is one of the nicest edited videos I have seen in an extremely long time. Absolutely wonderful, visuals told what they needed to and let the music take charge.

i personally like the sound of the old triangle wave. i think it has its place and that a lot of nes music was probably designed around the strange sound of it

In 6 months you went from 255 to 24.6k subscribers, that in it self shows the hidden community that you stumbled into and helped create. I love what you’ve done and brought me back to a forgotten style of music which I am grateful to be introduced to again. Thank you, and I hope you find more fun in doing this now than ever as your community grows.

I’m not gonna lie, I know absolutely nothing about any of this but i’m still so intrigued by the differences in sound chips and their methods to create music.

This feels like the audio equivalent of turning old animations into 60 fps ones with interpolation software. It's interesting to see the end result, but it's also interesting to see how clearly the original animators (or the original sound designers) clearly knew and could take advantage of their limitations. Just like how making an old Disney movie 60 fps might make it seem smoother, but lose some of the original animation's timing, this makes the original games' audio much cleaner, but it loses the original's actual sound. I do prefer the originals, both ways, but this is really cool. And it always makes me wonder what new songs would sound like if they were played on these old sound chips.

It's so cool seeing the limitations of these different sound chips, and then hearing them without those limitations! Crazy that this video was just uploaded today, I was just trying to find some info on the NES's sound chip and instead I found this super cool experiment. I'd love to see more information on how exactly you did the interpolation for the triangle and sawtooth waves, and maybe even a breakdown of some of the code! I'd also love to hear Dr Wily's Castle from Mega Man 2, and the Fire Emblem theme. Can't wait to see more videos by you!

6:40 What I like about the quantization noise is it reminds me of searching for a good FM channel to fall asleep to when I was a kid. Smooth Jazz was one of the channels that I could pick up so having that "ssssssss" lingering around really brings be back to those times. It's also like listening to vinyl, it's not perfect but has more soul than the perfect recording.

It's amazing how much creativity and tuning was involved in designing such simple devices. In comparison nowadays everything is poorly optimized and if you complain they just tell you to buy better hardware...

I've never played in a NES but I really love the "chiptune" songs, originally made from chip limitations, but now is an entire music style (just like "pixel art", originally from hardware limitations, is now an art style).

It should be noted that composers of the time tended to be aware of these limitations, and often relied on said quirks to achieve interesting effects: the stepped triangle wave has a shimmering quality to it which can enhance a track's liveliness, or even used to ominous effect in Journey to Silius, where the sounds acquire sort of a sci-fi vibe that is a bit choked out when cleaned. The last track, The Coffee Zone, also benefits greatly from the quantization noise, which makes it sound like there's a drummer playing brushes throughout the song; it speaks more of "jazz band in a seedy bar" to me that way. On another note, this topic reminds me of any debate where technology limitations make anything fuzzier and warmer: vinyl vs CD; CRT vs LCD; valves vs transistors and so on and so forth. There's just an aura of maybe nostalgia to any technology which degrades an otherwise pristine source signal, and stripping them down to their essence to be revealed as generated invariably makes them feel aseptic. You just can't substitute for said "loss in translation", to the extent of actively trying to replicate these flaws that were once perceived as undesirable.

I didn't understand most of the technical aspects of what you did, but it was interesting. I feel that I appreciate the imperfections of the original sounds much more now. Thank you for sharing!

I'd love to see this work put in as a setting for emulators we have now! You've done an incredible job of recreating some tracks with the fixes you found.

For the Castlevania bit I was initially like "No way this is better smoothed out, he's being ridiculous." But in context, with all the other instruments. Wow. What an improvement.

Although some of these fixes were very cool, I find that the NES triangle wave works better with bitcrushing. It just has a much crunchier, agressive sound that I think makes it work exceptionally well as a bass instrument. I would have never been able to think of the bitcrushing as a bad thing. I will admit tho, at high pitches some of the harmonics in the 2A03's triangle can become quite annoying. If there was a way to filter or EQ it while keeping it 4 bit, that would be a dream. The VRC6 saw harmonics CAN be specially annoying since they are very dissonant and audible at regular low pitches; but in a full song, they are always going to be masked by other instruments so it's not that big a deal. Fixing non linear mixing is also good but, and since so many NES soundtracks are well thought around it, it would probably work just in certain ocassions. Idk though, I should probably take a listen to many of your fixed soundtracks to actually tell. Over all, really cool content! I'd love to see more in-depth chiptune analysis like this on KZfaq. The only other people doing similar work in the Internet as far as I'm aware are Bucky and Patrick from Retro Game Audio.

This video is a delight and your scholarly approach shows a deep understanding of the hardware and a worthy appreciation of both what is and what could be. You earned my subscription. I salute you.

I am here months later from the upload, YET IM AMAZED AND FELL IN LOVE! I hope you're doing good cause I would love to hear more tunes from the improved sound chips, amazing work!

Man a channel like this has only existed and survived in the old day of youtube. The fact were being treated this well by whom ever this is, is a blessing of fresh air and a trip back down memory lane into the better days of the KZfaq. 2006-2012 GOLDEN YEARS!

When I was a kid I noticed that weird triangle wave sound. A real triangle wave sounds better, but to me, the original one is very different from the square waves (the real triangle just sounds very similar), so it adds complexity to the music.

I loved the style of the video and how you edited it together. It was really satisfying to watch! Great work! Subscribed!

Liked and subscribed. Absolutely adored your presentation and the editing! Very professional of your part! Discovered this video by the recommendations, I'm happy KZfaq is promoting your work!

While the smoother sound from the fixed triangle wave sounds cleaner, I prefer the retro, imperfect feel of the stepped triangle wave. Great video!

I am thankful to KZfaq for recommending this It was fun to see how NES tried to achieve and how you envisioned it.

Wow, the sound is really nice! I have never played Castlevania, but your edit of the soundtrack from Castlevania III is so good!!! And I'm interested in listening to more music from this game. Thank you for your job!

Thank you for creating this fantastic video sharing your work with us and explaining what you did and why! The music sounds amazing and your technical explanations and visualizations are fascinating. I love the video format you are using too. Please create more videos like this.

Even with the initial knee jerk "but the imperfections make it better!" reaction, I am absolutely floored by the resulting work. I'm a YM2612 guy at heart, but the sheer versatility of the Nintendo sound processors always catches me off guard. Amazing work, you have a new subscriber!!

The jagged edge wave feels authentic, but the smooth edge wave feels like the pause menu variant in retro-inspired modern chiptune osts indie games haha. Like the moment you press pause it seamlessly switches to the smooth edge version. I don't remember if that's Celestey or Cadence of Hyruley, but that's the vibes it's giving me! Each tool for each job :)

Woah that was super cool! Thanks for making the video! I really enjoyed that synthesized sound track at the end, it had big spelunky vibes. After hearing the difference between the flawed versions and the *corrected* ones, I was able to appreciate just how amazing the original sounds were, especially since the flaw was used *as* an instrument.

Amazing video! I love your cool, down to earth presentation style as well! You should seriously start uploading some full osts with these fixes! I bet it would be huge!

It would be cool if this could be added to an emulator as a setting to toggle. I love messing around with emulators and ways to throw a modern twist into them so I'd be down to play around with something like that.

Hearing the triangle wave as a proper triangle made me feel at rest, like I was finally able to relax.

Absolute banger of a video, love the revitalized old school sounds. Definitely adding this to my list of great videos. Keep up the amazing work!

This is amazing and the end track sounds so clear yet uniquely retro. You need more subs 28K isn't even comparable to the effort you put in your vida

Man if only there were a modern dj who did entire retro chiptunes sets. This is beautiful, unique and so nostalgic.

For those wondering, 0:52 is the bass line of the song "Rain Dance" by Fearofdark :)

wow, i did not expect to watch this whole video but learning about sound chips and sound fonts never ceases to amaze me :)

What I love about this video is leave me with curiosity to learn more about how the early sounds design worked in these consoles. “The Coffee Zone” instantly gave me this nostalgic Gran Turismo vibe and I love it. Thank you for an awesome video!!

This is why old electric music is so interesting to me. The limitations a lot of these producers had to work around is mind boggling in today's VST and DAW time. It's actually a little crazy genres like breakbeat and trance could even exist in the 90s and sound as good as it did.

I would love to hear Pollyanna, Bein Friends, Paradise Line, Magicant, the battle themes and the title/credits music of Earthbound Beginnings on this revised chip. Basically the whole soundtrack

This video was well-explained, and fun to listen to, thank you. Awesome to hear the theoretical limit of what older chips can produce with a newer composition, and simultaneously the original music that took the hardware flaws and exploited them for the listeners' gain.

Just found this video, and I must say thank you. I've always been interested in learning more about Chiptune and its technology, but it's never something it's actively sought out nor considered getting into. This video has sparked an interest in learning far more about how this genre of music works, and how to utilize it. I thank you humbly once again, kind sir. You have earned the like and sub.

The thing is, the NES's triangle wave is a very nostalgic sound. It's _distinctly_ NES. As in, when you hear it, it immediately registers as "NES music". That jagged triangle wave is unique to the 2A03 and you could argue that the charm is lost if it's smoothed out. I guess it depends whether you're after the NES aesthetic or want to use the chips to their fullest potential

I see this work and I can only imagine what a fresh sound for the GBA era of games would sound like. Golden Sun tracks in particular. This is a really interesting and scientific video and I enjoy electronic sciences. Thanks for sharing your hard work!

I can say this is a HUGELY underappreciated endeavor. And yes, I'd LOVE to listen to more clean NES tracks. The result, though subtle, it's simply delightful.

I'm an avid fan of analog synthesizers, so it's interesting seeing such compressed digital waveforms scaled up into a much closer replica of analog. Back in those days, the limitations of digital soundchips were seen as an inevitable liability, but today there's a nostalgic charm to the lofi sound of old soundchips. Cool video :)

I love this. Your passion is wonderful to behold, and your talent goes beyond anything that I knew was possible. And you'll get better at editing over time I'm sure lol I'm subscribed now

Popped up in my recommendations and I've instantly subbed and liked. Your stuff's good!

Oddly enough, I liked the static hum from the VRC7 in that one example you showed, it added a second layer of ambience. Yes, the white noise was annoying, but the little high pitched hum accompanied was a nice little extra note. But as far as everything else goes, my fucking god, good stuff. I didn't think Demon Seed could sound any more badass than it already does and then you crank bass up to 11. What a tune. You're doing god's work.

With these improvements some tracks have a DS feel more than a classical 8bit feel. It's amazing how the dirtiness and inaccuracy of the sounds it's so much a part of the feel of that generation.

Thanks for this experiment that displays wonderfully all the atmosphere and vibe that the “imperfections” bring the music. Hearing the direct comparison really drives home how sterile the more “perfect” wave shapes make the music.

This just became one of my top 10 favorite channels. The algorithm is really putting in work these last few months for me.

I won't lie, the static in the background of 5:49 really adds to the ambience of the track, i would call that a happy accident man. Either way, cool video broski.

EE here -- sampling and information being what they are, I'd humbly suggest trying to smooth the corners of the sawtooth, with an exponential curve (or filter), with time constant near the [original] sample rate. The idealized-sawtooth test is extremely grating on the ears; the risetime is -- well, I didn't record it to check, but I'm assuming it's at whatever the upsampled rate is? Which, mind, might be an intentional aspect, just as the steps of the original chip might be used intentionally by composers -- and so, likely plays better in some songs than others. But other methods of filling in that missing information can be tried, and are just as valid. That's the issue here, of course; the low sample rate implies missing information, but there's no way to recover, infer or imply what is actually missing. So it's up to experiments like this, to see what works and where (i.e. for what songs). Likewise, for interpolating PCM, it's hard to say; the aliasing might be intentional -- particularly for noisy samples like cymbals. The best you can do in terms of band-limited filtering is probably sinc interpolation (i.e., brick wall filter at Fs/2). Linear interpolation is probably ineffective because, consider the impulse response, a single sample standing up above the DC level: the line interpolates from zero at the previous sample, to peak, then back to zero on the following sample. A considerable amount of energy has been cut off from the rectangular-topped sample. Some of this energy has been moved to the base (the triangle base is 2 samples wide, versus a rectangle of 1), but due to RMS, the peaks are weighted more heavily so the total energy is significantly reduced. Instead, something like a cosine, with the peak/valley aligned to adjacent samples (i.e., a Hann window), might give a fairer weighting, while smoothing the edges (reducing aliasing/harmonics beyond Fs/2). Note that any upsampling/windowing process is equivalent to simply filtering the signal, so, a convolution in time domain (the fairly trivial FIR filter), multiplication in frequency domain (FFT, mul, iFFT), or passing it through an analog (or equivalent digital, IIR) filter of similar response. We could reflect on the noise generators as well. These chips have a short period PRNG (usually LFSR I think), using relatively few bits so the samples loop fairly often. This is used for anything from rumbling, thunder and explosions (at low sample rates), to wind and cymbals. The short repeating period gives it an unexpected tonal quality, while adjusting the sample rate gives it a sort of crude adjustable lowpass point. We could consider many ways to generalize this instrument: use a higher sample rate with a longer period; use white noise (i.e. more than 1 bit per sample); use true white noise (analog samples or TRNG); variable bandlimiting instead of sample rate; and various types of filters to implement that bandlimiting (a PRBS spectrum has a sinc envelope, or others could be tried as well). Nice work, cheers!

Much as I can appreciate the craftsmanship that went into the refinement and cleanliness that are the changes you've made. I like my Chiptunes to have that sense of "dirt" and texture. That said, I love experiments like this. The process of distillment and purification of sound for the hell of it gives it a sense "can-do" scientific prowess that I can't help but admire.

That's the beauty of those old systems, the things they figured out with limited capabilities. The work-arounds and compromises they made to give new gaming experiences while working with essentially the same hardware made gaming accessible to the masses. An NES or an arcade cabinet had a fraction of the power of our phones but they learned how to get the very most out of it. Today the sky is the limit, but you need a computer that costs thousands of dollars to get the full effect of what the designers have created, and most people aren't able to do that.

Gorgeous. The keyboard solo in the outro is shiver-inducing. As a brutalist, I found nothing missing from your presentation, and encourage you to not feel outdone by editing teams; you were genuine, and that is what matters.

Really let's you appreciate how Journey to Silius devs (and probably others) composed their music to play with the janky triangle wave in mind to make some very rich textures and harmony not present in the smoothed version. Thank you for making this video, otherwise little things like that couldn't really be appreciated

As a synthesist first and a game purist about 8 octaves later, I absolutely love everything that you did here. I especially loved the hi-res version of Demon Seed which expressed some overtones that were overshadowed by the original aliasing.

I didn't know anything about this subject before I watched this video and I was absolutely enthralled the entire time. Great vid!

The Solstice title theme by THE Legendary Tim Follin, sounds great but I've always fantasized about what would he do if he had the additional sound channels from the Famicom Disk System. With your improvements, it will sound even better! On second thought, the white noise is actually built into the song and is used to represent the cymbal "tsshh" sound

This is so interesting. As someone who has worked a lot with FamiTracker, it’s so insightful to hear what these instruments would sound like with fundamental issues removed. Almost 10 years ago, I took a 5 minute wind band piece and put it into FamiTracker-it took two instances of a custom edited file with all of the expansions playing at once and a utility I found that syncs the playback of multiple instances of FamiTracker. Of course it’s not realistic, but it was amazing to hear it all come together, especially after months of working on it. I wonder how different it would sound with these changes.

Wonderful video! I never played an NES myself, but I can appreciate both the original sounds, as well as the work you put in to make these cleaner sounds. They're both great! Thanks for the great video!

nice work. I didn't know your channel so with the title, I assumed that you had created a custom replacement chip or something. I was really impressed by the work you did "remixing" those songs. they are great !!!

As a "producer" I am interested in synthesis and sound in general. I guess that's how this got in my recommended. This is very interesting and kind of inspiring. I have subbed with notifications lol. Please create more things like this

Other than some of the mixing issues, I prefer the sounds of the original. A lot of the music sounds like it was composed around these so-called "imperfections". That said, it is a cool experiment to do and a nice educational video.

i like the amount of work you had with this and i appreciate ! it's always fun to discovery stuff about old consoles and their games ! thanks !

The amount of creativity and inventiveness that went into early PC and 8-bit console sound design is astounding. I remember an old game for the Atari 800XL called Alternate Reality that did things nobody else had ever done with the atari sound hardware to make dynamic music work. Amazing stuff. Thanks for posting this video!

Honestly everything sounded perfect up until you played coffee zone. It was kind of designed with those audio flaws in mind which makes it sound a bit more disappointing played through cleaner outputs. The quantization of the fm chip makes it sound like some kind studio synth and the triangle makes a bit more of an impact to the melody with the hiss. That said, this is a really cool concept. Makes me curious what a c64 would sound like.

Fearofdark also known as Steve is a person that has truely changed my life. I originally found his song rolling down the street in my katamari from a meme about pelo back in like 2019 or so and I thought not much about it until I started listening to more of his music until his songs became embedded with core memory’s in my mind that if I even think about it his songs will definitely be there. I hope he never stops making chiptunes because god this guy is probably one of the best chiptune composers I have ever listened to. So thank you Steve, Xavi

The first 2 square waves at the start of the video made a fire beat 🔥🔥🔥

I really appreciate your work, there are few people who are interested in topics about how video game music is evolving and the technology used to introduce it in such a limited space! you have a new subscriber! Greetings from Mexico!

bruh Fearofdark is an amazing chiptune musician, all of their songs make me feel like I just acheived something like reaching the end of a great game.

I’m glad KZfaq threw this my way. Really interesting video with some beautiful sounds and can’t wait to see what’s next from the channel 👍🏼

was watching and then the coffee zone hit. i was like ayo ive heard this little did i know alot of work has gone towards such a great piece this made me smile. ive always loved chiptune music and to see that people are doing work to make it better is just something else! Also keep it up :D this makes me wanna work on my chiptune i was creating.

Def YT suggested this vid to me. Enjoyed it! It caused me to ponder what it would have been like back in the day for the musical composer to work with the NES/etc. programmers. Obv not all things were musically possible. 6 channels, many limitations. It is astounding that they were capable of doing all that amazing work with the tools that they had at the time.

the video: “we have reached and surpassed 255 subscribers!” *glances at the current subscriber count* 9.7k subscribers …..yeah, that’s definitely more than 255. (for real, though-seems like you’ve met your goal of KZfaq recommending this channel to more people! crazy that in just two weeks you could make such a big jump in subscriber count. congrats on the new follower base, and props to you for making such an interesting and well-executed video! no need for crazy editing when everything is showcased perfectly. i wish you luck in the future!)

I love how even without the limitations that the musicians were working with to enhance their music, it still sounds really bloody good. Yes, a little bit of charm is lost through emulation, but for the purpose of demonstrating, this video is absolutely perfect. Massive props.

This was an absolute joy to watch and learn. Great content

The sound quality difference is astounding. Fantastic work!

As a former bubblehead sonarman, I find this extremely fascinating. I've had to look at lots of waves over many decades of overlapping tech so seeing how this one works triggered not only nostalgia for the old NES but also for my old job. Subscribed, belled, thanks!

Something that's important to note is that the composers were aware of these flaws/limitations while they were making music, and they based their compositions around them. Removing the flaws doesn't work retroactively, because that's not how the author intended it to sound

Honestly I thought it may be interesting to check out but I actually enjoyed your video. it was randomly suggested to me. thank you. I appreciate what you did there cuz I played many years playing these video games hearing the crappy sound chip based on the limitations of their days. But I really appreciate that cuz it gives me a whole new perspective think about some old games that I used to play a lot so thank you very much

Amazing dedication and clear explanation of the tech that made so much awesome video game music in the 80's

This video was a delight, through and through. I really enjoyed hearing such clean versions of songs from old memories, countless hours playing games. Truly you are doing great work.