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SNES Audio Unit As Stand-Alone Player

Posted by timothy on from the you-must-stand-alone dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Raphael Assénat successfully turned the SNES' audio processing unit into a stand alone unit which can be controlled through a parallel port, allowing people to play SNES music separate from games and the SNES' main unit. Elsewhere there is also a tutorial about adding S/PDIF digital sound output to the SNES."

20 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. Love SNES music... by WilliamsDA · · Score: 3, Informative

    I love SNES music.. I've got a few OSTs (original soundtracks) dumped to mp3, but they just don't sound the same as the original. Zophar.net has a good archive of SPCs and links to plugins for winamp, etc. Very cool stuff. Also, Skytopia has a lot of interesting and relevant info. Axelay will always be my favorite!

  2. Listen to Video Game music without this hardware by lou2ser · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm sure some people know about listening to old videogame software without out this hardware hack. You won't be as leet as this guy, but you can still enjoy the music.

    You can find a player at http://www.zophar.net/utilities/music.html, a huge archive for just about every platform.

    After you get a player for your choosen platform, you can click through to a song database. For example, here are the SNES songs available: http://www.zophar.net/zsnes/spc/

    Have fun.

  3. Minibosses! by z3021017 · · Score: 3, Informative

    There's group out there called Minibosses which use your favourite 8-bit video game tunes to make music:
    http://minibosses.com

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  4. obsolete... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Any music of any SNES game has been available for many years with the .spc file format. The audio files sound exactly as the music would sound on the SNES console.
    A really large .spc database can be found here: http://www.snesmusic.org/spcsets/#so

    1. Re:obsolete... by IntergalacticWalrus · · Score: 2, Informative

      You missed the point. With this little hardware hack, the guy can actually load spc files directly on a REAL SNES SPU, instead of running them through an SNES SPU emulator. Now how cool is that?

  5. Re:overrated by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    What the hell are you talking about? C64 and Amiga games had some of the best music ever.

  6. Mirrordot link by Djupblue · · Score: 3, Informative

    Server seems to be getting slower, here is link to mirror: http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/cbe721b01c7832be3 7d0c41898de0ba1/index.html

  7. Nice idea, needs to be taken further... by Aphrika · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...like the SidStation based on the legendary MOS 6581 (aka. SID) chip from the Commodore 64.

    The SidStation is essentially a MIDI synth expander that uses the SID chip as it's main sound source. It'd be interesting to do the same kind of thing with a SNES sound source, although from memory, it wasn't a sound chip worthy of any merit.

  8. Other uses of Videogame Music by lou2ser · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here are some other places to listen to videogame music in nontradional ways.

    First there are the minibosses http://minibosses.com/ They are a cover band of videogame music that preform live shows. They even have a few MP3s on their site.

    Then there is djpretzel's remix.overclocked.org http://remix.overclocked.org/ Here you can find tons of songs set to a beat. For the true emulation nerd, check out the original overclocked.org http://www.overclocked.org/ comic strips. They are well dated, but still bring a smile to my face.

  9. These guys... by Karpe · · Score: 3, Informative

    Minibosses surely like. They have a (very good) band that only plays video game classics. Check out their demos!

    Thanks for Ars Technica for the info, from the Ars holiday gift guide

  10. Better Yet by gotr00t · · Score: 2, Informative

    Why would you download ~3-4mb lossy mp3's when you can get 64kb files containing the original songs with full fidelity? All you gotta do is goto zophar's domain and check out the SPC collection. You can then download a player application to listen to them.

  11. Nes Music by bdcrazy · · Score: 5, Informative

    Some old nes music has been remixed by a few talented people. For game music in general, and a fair amount of nes remixes in specific, take a quick trip to http://www.ocremix.org/

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  12. Re:Not forgetting... by schnits0r · · Score: 3, Informative

    actually, the "cover" is not by SOAD. IT's by "the rabbit joint", just some idiot on kazaa changed it to get more hits.

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  13. Re:overrated by Chiisu · · Score: 3, Informative

    I guess you've never heard of the SidStation.... Many electronic artists like the sound chips from consoles, they are unique in many ways....

  14. Re:Isolating SNES sound channels? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Yes, ZSNES can do this. F5-F12 toggles channel 1-8

  15. Re:overrated by PhoenixFlare · · Score: 4, Informative

    OC Remix

    There is a lot of game music out there that's amazingly good, especially from the PSX era onwards.

    A lot of the Squaresoft RPGs on the SNES had awesome music as well. RPGs in general tend to have pretty good soundtracks, in fact.

  16. SNES vs. PS1; audio inaccuracies corrected by tepples · · Score: 2, Informative
    • The dedicated CPU for audio in the Super NES was SPC700, not SPC800.
    • The bus from the SPC700 to the main WDC 65c816 CPU (with obligatory Nintendo custom I/O on die) was comparatively slow, resulting in "loading" in about every game.
    • The PS1 had 24-channel sound, compared to the SPC700's DSP's 8-channel sound.
    • The PS1's DSP supported an improved version of the predictive waveform compression that the SPC700's DSP had. (SPC700 samples are called "BRR"; PS1/PS2 samples are called "VAG". Both worked by adding a 4-bit value to a weighted sum of the previous two samples; VAG improved seeking and looping accuracy as well as introducing some different filters.)
    • The PS1 had 512 KiB for audio; the SPC700 had only 64 KiB.
    • The PS1 could output at least 44100 Hz, though many games ran streaming music at only about 38400 Hz in order to use better error-correction on the CD. The SPC700's DSP was limited to about 32000 Hz.
  17. For the nth time, it's by The Rabbit Joint by tepples · · Score: 2, Informative

    To learn the story about the Zelda cover misattributed to SOAD, Google this.

  18. Linux .spc players by tepples · · Score: 2, Informative

    Are there any Linux .spc players available?

    Did you try Google? First result links to a page on zophar.net with two players for GNU/Linux: one an XMMS plug-in and one a command-line program.

  19. Re:Isolating SNES sound channels? by tepples · · Score: 2, Informative

    Yes, SNESAmp (a .spc player) supports turning off each of the 8 Super NES DSP channels.

    Or you can just rip all of a ROM's samples in one go with Snessor, available here.