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SNES Audio Unit As Stand-Alone Player
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."
Some of the old stuff was very good, made all the more remarkable by the limitations imposed. I remember back in the days of the C64, one Rob Hubbard, his music was fantastic. Thouugh I'll admit it hasn't really stood the test of time.
My favorite though, was Bomb the Bass' tune for the classic Bitmap Brother's game Xenon II
All fans of video game music remixes should also know of Overclocked Remix and VGMix.com. There's some really great talent floating around these sites, combined with all those nifty tunes you've been humming for the last 20 years.
There is a band called The Advantage, that play nothing but covers of classic 8bit ninetintedo songs, and they play them well. the songs may have simple bases, but they are actually really good musicly.
sorry 'bout the mess...
The SPC-800 (SNES sound chip) was capable of some incredible stuff, especially for the time. The Playstation can't even begin to match it. It had full 8-channel sound, it stored the samples in the file (plus it also had its own sample set in the hardware). The best way to describe it is a combo MIDI/MOD player, all done in hardware. Listen to the soundtrack from Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy 6 sometime, there is some VERY good music in there...worlds away from beeps and blips. Incidentally, the SPC-800 was designed by Sony...and yet they can't make a decent sound chip for their own systems. Go figure.
haha, well it's your lucky day. Guess what one of the new things in our set is?... A song where we use two video cameras (one of them overhead) and I built this Atari 2600 controlled box that switches cameras in sync with the music. ;o)
*ahem* SPC-700, and there is no sample set stored in rom. Every game must provide it's own. Not to step on your comment you're right in that the snes had incredible sound capabilities for its time. However keep in mind even with it's multi channel 16 bit 44kHz capabilities, it used a very nasty and incredibly lossy compression format. Very vaguely put it divides a sound into small blocks and compresses it into 4 bits with a scaling value. Every block can have it's own scaling value, and as you can hear it works. However it is very crude.
I am very fond of the SNES sound processor. The SPC-700 is an amazing little machine that still makes me smile even today. But there are actually some software engines that can enhance the original SPC code.
www.alpha-ii.com has a winamp plugin that can sample the sound up to 96Khz 32bit Stereo with Bicubic interpolation.
The SPC-700 by default runs a guassian interpolation @ 22khz 16 bit Stereo. Now sure we're not talking about SACD quality this software enhancement does take the original cassette resolution and enhance it beyond CD resolution. The Alpha-II (winamp plugin) engine can take the original code and actually make it's resolution as high as DVD-Audio.
If you listen, you can hear the added sharpness and the overall effect, and I can honestly say that some of this software can beat the SPC-700 at it's own game.
Play "Jigsaw Plains" from Kirby's Dream Course and you'll notice what I mean.