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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?
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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Server seems to be getting slower, here is link to mirror: http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/cbe721b01c7832be3 7d0c41898de0ba1/index.html
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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.
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.
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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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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I guess you've never heard of the SidStation.... Many electronic artists like the sound chips from consoles, they are unique in many ways....
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.