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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."
I'm torn though - do I want to listen to Shitty Beep Concerto, or Tinny Licensed Song in G minor
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In the first 10 posts, the poor SNES/Spdif page is slashdotted... Maybe hosting on his dreamcast might've been a better idea?
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!
I SO don't need this.
I got SNES tunes playing in my head since I'm young, and can't seem to stop. Damn you, Final Fantasy!
(For the curious, I do have voices in my head too, and they're telling me to do nasty stuff. To hurt curious persons. That would be you.)
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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
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.
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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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. .spc database can be found here: http://www.snesmusic.org/spcsets/#so
A really large
i think that's very cool. i love to see new efforts being drawn on retro hardware.
but i do wonder why one would bother building a parallel port unit to play the music when there are software emulators doing that work for us already?
if it were truly *standalone*, then it would be a fun, useful way to incorporate it into music projects or just have fun - but as it's tied to the computer already, why not just use the software?
Yeah, I know why bother? But most of the time when new gaming hardware comes out it is only used to a fraction of its full potential before the next generation arrives. So part of me really thinks it's cool to squeeze out some of that perhaps untapped potential like this. Maybe Tree Wave will play something with this.
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For things like the commodore audio chip you can't get exactly the same sounds without the real hardware. But for SNES I think that zsnes + roms + alsa does a pretty faithful rendition of the sound. And if I fiddle with the sound options you could argue that however unfaithful the sound becomes, it is actually superior in quality to that of just an SNES.
That's one thing the SNES did have over the Genesis. The sound quality was vastly superior. I remember the "echoy" cave noises in super mario world, that was something else.
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What could possibly go wrong?
...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.
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.
**cues Zozo music from FF3** Hahaha, you shall never escape from this insanely catchy beat!
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
because it's innovative, techy and causes other techs to laugh. It's a "because it's there" kinda thing.
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.
Coming next from this company is a tiny module that lets you get the blindness and headaches of an Nintendo Virtual Boy without actually having to lug the unit around.
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.
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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For things like the commodore audio chip you can't get exactly the same sounds without the real hardware. But for SNES I think that zsnes + roms + alsa does a pretty faithful rendition of the sound. And if I fiddle with the sound options you could argue that however unfaithful the sound becomes, it is actually superior in quality to that of just an SNES.
That's one thing the SNES did have over the Genesis. The sound quality was vastly superior. I remember the "echoy" cave noises in super mario world, that was something else.
I agree on all counts. I have a soft spot for the SNES's defining sound (Actraiser in stereo really cemented it for me), but the Commodore's SID is just on a whole other level. Occasionally a piece of hardware--be it audio, film, video, or whatever--is released that has such a unique character and artistic potential that it outlives its generation. Personally, I think the SidStation is the quintessence of reborn game audio hardware.
But in the world of synths every piece of gear has its nuances, and even the dookie sound chip in the MD/Genesis could be refabbed with an interface that liberates it and affords it a special niche all its own.
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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Wow, I knew the Wierd Al ones were fakes, but the one labeled as SOAD sounds just like the dude.
Good to know it isn't.
Hmmm witty sig or funny sig? Maybe elitest techy sig!
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.
I guess you've never heard of the SidStation.... Many electronic artists like the sound chips from consoles, they are unique in many ways....
Yes, ZSNES can do this. F5-F12 toggles channel 1-8
I don't know if it was a typo, but that is a PERFECT word for the people I see around here.
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.
*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.
To learn the story about the Zelda cover misattributed to SOAD, Google this.
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.
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.
Oh someone beat me to it. OC Remix is insane if not superior to anything out there.
If anything today's games don't have any original music. They just buy tracks from already existing artists. Which if I may add... mainstream is 70% hyped up over marketed garbage anyways. Good stuff is all in the underground.
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.
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That's right. All your base.