MysticNaz99
Member
If I were to put an entire song in one sample, make a song with only that sample's note and then put it into a sega genesis game, would it work? (in a real genesis)
Curious question about sega genesis soundchip
- Thread starter MysticNaz99
- Start date
You technically could, but it's ill-advised.
I'm not well-versed on the specific chip, but the cartridge needs to have enough storage space for a sample that large, and 16 bit cartridge memory is notoriously small. That's also a big reason for why every sample you'll come across in a real Genesis soundtrack is stored at a low bit and sample rate; it means less fidelity in terms of playback, but it also takes up much less room on the cartridge.
Another issue would be that you can't let any game sound effects use the PCM channel to play samples while the song sample is playing, because doing so would interrupt the song in its entirety. IIRC, you also cannot stop the sample and restart it, meaning that the music would have to continue to play while the game is paused, unless you plan on starting it all over from the beginning when the game is unpaused.
One technique that was pretty common on the SNES was to play drum loops (a good example is Super Bomberman 3) that would be repeated every measure, while other instruments would be played on other channels. It was a good way to work around channel limitations without taking up a huge chunk of memory. You could theoretically do this with the Genesis chip pretty easily as well; the only technical limitation is that any sound effects that use the PCM channel would still necessarily override your drum loop, but at the very least you would only need to wait a second or a half-second for that drum loop to return rather than full minutes at a time.
I'm not well-versed on the specific chip, but the cartridge needs to have enough storage space for a sample that large, and 16 bit cartridge memory is notoriously small. That's also a big reason for why every sample you'll come across in a real Genesis soundtrack is stored at a low bit and sample rate; it means less fidelity in terms of playback, but it also takes up much less room on the cartridge.
Another issue would be that you can't let any game sound effects use the PCM channel to play samples while the song sample is playing, because doing so would interrupt the song in its entirety. IIRC, you also cannot stop the sample and restart it, meaning that the music would have to continue to play while the game is paused, unless you plan on starting it all over from the beginning when the game is unpaused.
One technique that was pretty common on the SNES was to play drum loops (a good example is Super Bomberman 3) that would be repeated every measure, while other instruments would be played on other channels. It was a good way to work around channel limitations without taking up a huge chunk of memory. You could theoretically do this with the Genesis chip pretty easily as well; the only technical limitation is that any sound effects that use the PCM channel would still necessarily override your drum loop, but at the very least you would only need to wait a second or a half-second for that drum loop to return rather than full minutes at a time.
SeventhSentinel
In charge of way less than you might think
Administrator
Sonic Team Junior
Kart Krew™️
Somewhere there is (or was) a YouTube video demonstrating a 40 second clip of a song being played at 32000Hz on real Genesis hardware. The video states that the song takes up nearly all available cartridge space.
The closest you can get to a whole song playing on PCM is the approach taken by the developers of Toy Story for Genesis, where they made tracker modules, programmed the Genesis to play them, and fed the mixed audio to the PCM channel, and I'm not going to pretend to understand how they managed to do that.
The closest you can get to a whole song playing on PCM is the approach taken by the developers of Toy Story for Genesis, where they made tracker modules, programmed the Genesis to play them, and fed the mixed audio to the PCM channel, and I'm not going to pretend to understand how they managed to do that.
MysticNaz99
Member
cool
Chimes
Jesus Christ, you people are getting scary!
Short answer: Yes! You might need to plan it out heavily beforehand. And hassle with optimization.
Long answer: During the late 1980's, "Uncle Art" of European Amiga licenced game fame asked this question, and he had... some results.
Basically he had a pre-recorded song and chopped it up. The song repeats parts, so Uncle Art had its repetition cut down so that instead of the sample itself repeating that part of the song, the Amiga itself is repeating that part of the song in a sequence. This can turn what is actually a 20-second segment to a 4-minute song. The Amiga After Burner title theme was basically the grandfather of vaporwave's "chopped and screwed" technique.
Has it been done on the Genesis? Yes. The tricky part of doing songs this way is figuring out how long your sample is and what sample rate (i.e. your "note") is going to be. You can have your song's "bars" be long before repeating, but that'll take up more space. You can have them be short, but that leaves little leeway for ways to repeat it. You can go for a higher sample rate, but it'll eat up more space. You can go for a lower sample rate, but that makes it more muffled and sounds nasty.
...of course, with the exception of sound driver hassles and sound driver limitations, there's nothing stopping you from doing this and also having the YM3438's FM do some accompaniment. That's what Combat Cars does, anyhow.