SNES Audio System Overview - SPC700 Series pt. 1
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 ต.ค. 2024
- Ever wondered how the SNES's audio subsystem, the SPC700, produced all the beautiful music and sounds in all of those SNES classics? It's all explained right here.
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SPC700 & ARAM - SNES Features Pt. 10 - • SPC700 & ARAM - Super ...
These videos should not only be part of a real course regarding low level programming, but these are so well made, that they should really be part of a Nintendo or programming museum. Your work goes beyond excellence and is absolutely monumental. Can't wait for the rest of the series!
Bump
I definitely learned more about low level computing from this channel than I did my actual low level programming course at college.
@@KyleDavis328 Ditto!
So glad to see you're back! Hope you are doing okay and that everything's getting better for you -- the works you make for this little community might feel vestigial or like footnotes but they are all such a positive thing and we're glad you're still able to do it. And you're inspiring so many of us to learn more about computers and hardware. You're a great ambassador! Hang in there!
I second everything Tim said, and wanted to add that your videos have been a major reason in my decision to get a degree in computer engineering. Thank you for being such an inspiration!
welcome back! great educational value in this video as always
Of course we see jan Misali / Mr. Conlang man over here learning about the computer language.
I've seen u on two completely different vids in the past week now
toki.
a surprise to be sure but a welcome one
This makes me feel like programming back then was such a resource-constrained job that it forced a lot of organizational creativity, which is something I love to see.
Exactly, it’s art through adversity. It’s why I still play a lot of the games back then, while newer ones are forgotten quickly
If I remember correctly, Super Mario Kart came from an attempt to create a follow-up to F-Zero.
@@jimmyhirr5773 I believe they wanted a 2 player fzero, but they realized the SNES couldn't handle it at the speed and size of the levels in F-Zero (something how mode 7 2 player could only be 1/4 of the size), so they came up with the idea of Kart racing instead, since the levels would be smaller and the speed would be slower. Pretty cool that the whole series is just because of that limitation
@@stevenschiro1838: F-Zero streams new tilemap data into VRAM during gameplay, just like a regular platformer. You can't do that for 2 players because one may be so slow that he's in a completely different area of the level. You'd have to switch to a top-down view like in F-1 Grand Prix, and halfway across the screen move the "camera" to the second player's section of the tilemap.
as with everything involved in humanity, limitation breeds creativity. if it didn't we literally wouldn't be here both physically and technologically.
Your SNES videos helped me greatly when I hacked the HD features into bsnes. It's quite possible I would not have been able to put bsnes-hd together without them. And I still use and enjoy them.
Now you start focusing on audio in great detail which I look forward to for about half a dozen reasons. And, yes, one of them is discussions about "HD audio" via sample packs (like texture packs).
Keep up the great work. All the best. Greetings from Germany.
↑ Dieser Kommentar müsste mal gepinnt werden :)
I knew about resource mods for Dolphin but never thought there'd be similar mods for a SNES emulator (in retrospect it makes sense, I just never considered it). Keep up the good work.
The SNES has some of my favorite sound capabilities of any console, SNES music always sounds amazing.
It sounds amazing in the popular games with quality developers working on them. There were some low quality SNES games that didn't use the sound chip well that sound like knives on a chalkboard instead of actual music.
I could just imagine what they could have done with it if the sample memory wasn't limited to the SPC700's address space.
Likely theres a sound swapping trick to swap sound samples in & out on the fly to get around that 64KB limitation😁🙏🙏
This way we don’t have to cut sound samples in pieces and down sample them agressivaly and/or worry about the limited amount of samples we could store inside it no.
Because with sound swapping we will have more freedom in what we wanna do on the snes.
Star ocean and tales of phantasia does contain the flexible sound driver engine to allow playback of long voices.
How cool is that???
And with that in mind it makes me curious how much better snes audio could be by using such sound engine.
Imagine zelda 3,supermario allstars etc… with much better audio quality and all without an external soundchip at all, that would be cool🥲
“And when the world needed him most, he returned”
yeah yeah...
Really missed this channel!
My Masters project was to build a super nintendo on a Zynq FPGA. I got about 70% done with it, but had a working sound processor. The SPC700 was the coolest sound processor I've worked on in a along long time.
He's back! I hope everything is well with you.
I'm so looking forward to your upcoming audio subsystem deep dive(s). There's so much about these old platforms that you are able to bring to light, and you do it so well.
Oh boy more content that I barely understand because it's very in depth and complicated! I'm always excited to watch these so please keep doing them 😁
I love that because of how clear your pronounciation is, youtube's autogenerated subtitles are nearly flawless.
Great that your back, been looking forward to this!
except of course when youtube decides to forget the word "zero"
I love that this has actual subtitles, non auto generated.
I may barely understand it, but it's still a good day when rgme uploads!
Wow, this is exactly the kind of information I was looking for! Thanks so much for making this series. Your graphics series are great, but I've tried to understand the SPC700 at a lower level on my own. (with only minor success)
I make chiptune music, and I have math and some CS knowledge so I've wanted to make sense of the SPC700.
Last year an audio plugin called chipsynth SFC was released that emulates the SPC700 exactly. You can see the registers for playing back an SPC in this. I tried to break apart some of the classic music I like and get into the fine detail of the timing of everything. I ran into an issue trying to understand the envelopes though. The ADSR makes sense, but the custom envelope settings with the Increase Linear, Decrease Linear...etc wasn't exactly clear. I was trying to make sense of the timings, but couldn't quit get it with Nintendo's documentation. I was able to make sense of the bit operations a little bit couldn't convert it to actual lengths of time.
Your explanations of the timers completely cleared up my understanding of these. I can't wait to get to the rest... time to Patreon it up!
Words can't describe how glad I am to see this channel back. I may not fully get everything explained here but it sure is a joy learning about it
I’ve never owned an SNES, but I find these videos incredibly interesting, and they’re partly the reason I’m so into tech stuff. Not only that, but the way you explain registers have helped me greatly in understanding assembly!
Had a Genesis myself then an N64. I did get to play some ports on SNES games that were released on GBA (SMW, ALttP) and have used emulators (mostly virtual console) to play some of the games I missed like EarthBound.
I've always been fascinated by the SPC-700, ever since I was a child. In fact, several years ago, I built a jukebox to stream BRR files and upload SPC files to an SPC-700 module using an Arduino microcontroller. This video was so well put together that I had to subscribe. Keep up the good work! I look forward to the rest of this series.
These videos are probably better than the documentation given to developers back in the 90s by Nintendo. Except you have the gift of hindsight and they had the gift of trying to make something out of all the specs.
The snes will be always my favorite system of all time,heck even music sound professionals should ecknowledge the high quality output the snes can output.
Fun fact: pitch modulation doesn't occur instead of the modulator being played normally, but in parallel. But people generally mute the modulator's mixing level because it usually sounds bad played together. Though this doesn't turn off pitch modulation, because it ignores the modulator's mixing level and only uses ADSR/GAIN.
Always good to see (and in this case, hear) more, many thanks.
Excellent! We've all been eagerly awaiting these. Thank you so much for your work.
Such an impressive and powerful complex videogame console to this day. Your work is mind blowing. Thank You!
I love this! I love these! I learn SO MUCH! Thank you!
Another great, well constructed, explained and animated video! You have, ironically, an audio editing glitch at 8:55
I wondered what that was
Eyyyyyyy Your back!
Congrats on waking from your long slumber
Finally! You are the epitome of low level programming creators
WOOOOOO! YEAAAAAH BABY! That's what I've been waiting for! That's what it's all about! Wooooo!
This chip outperformed the Amigas. This thing was a beast. Remember, DKC's soundtrack was performed on this chipset!
How David Wise replicated those lengthy, evolving Korg Wavestation, sounds with 64KB is still beyond me. And I've had it explained to me before hahaha. Truly genius, and a sign of the remarkability of this sound setup.
Concerning the number of audio channels, yes. But the Amiga has still the advantage of having all its chip ram available for sound samples. For complex instruments, 64 kB is sometimes not enough.
@@Slamy4096 not to mention that some trackers could increase the number of channels from 4 to 8 at the cost of of some CPU cycles and reduced quality.
And Plok. Without an addon chip.
Lol no it didn't, by a lot. Have you listened to some of h0ffman's tracks for example?
Awesome, sitting down for a good watch - looking forward to this!
So glad to see you back. Thank you for all that you do
Fantastic! I'm so looking forward to the rest of the videos on the SPC700!
SNES audio is so incredibly memorable and was a huge step up from the NES or anything I had heard before it. I can still remember playing SMW for the first time shortly after the SNES was released, hearing the echo and other audio effects in the music and sound effects. It was mind blowing to a teenager who had been playing console games since the Atari 2600. :)
NO WAY THANK YOU SO MUCH I'VE BEEN NEEDING THIS!
When the world needed him most he returned.
I am sooooo happy to see you're back.
Glad to see another video! You're amazing!
I misread the thumbnail as over-explained and was like "YES!"
I love your voice!! 🥺🥺And this video is just so well made, I love how clearly you explain everything. I don't really know much about programming but you sound very smart talking about it xD This is useful to me because I'm interested in the SPC700 for music production purposes... thank you
This are one of the more awesome videos that I've seen from audio. I would love to see the same but for the NES
Thanks for sharing your knowledge here :)
big fan of your new video thumbnails!❤️
These videos are so well-made! These would be a massive help to anyone trying to write their own emulator. I wish I had something like this when I went to make my own GameBoy emulator as a hobby project.
please continue the series u are almost the ONLY who explains this
Yeaaaaaaaah! I've been waiting for this series! 🙌
Fun fact: in some revisions of the SNES the sound system is on a separate board that pops on to the motherboard like a internal cartridge!
This series will be awesome. Should cover parts of the SNES which are seldom talked.
I hope he often has to 'f f f f' 😃
“Part 1 in a series…”
Woohoo!
You should mention as well, that the SNES had a huge disadvantage of loading times for soundtrack data. Some games stay on a black screen to shovel sound data to the SPC whenever the song is changed.
Yep, though I assume most of this was from loading the actual samples. (and maybe sound effects too?)
@@Midee Yeah, the dirty secret is that data was often compressed, so even cartridge-based consoles didn't have "instant" load times. Loading data into a port-mapped chip can often be pretty slow.
It doesn’t take very long to load 32K.
Secret of Mana is especially annoying in that regard... thankfully there's a MSU1 patch.
Most N-SPC variants store few music at ARAM, which could be switched via input ports. Surprisingly, few N-SPC games (such as most of those using Nova's variant of the N-SPC) store *every song in ARAM(!).*
Yes! I've been waiting for this.
Fantastic! I've been excited for this series for some time. Your work never ceases to impress and capture my awe and curiosity. :)
thanks so much for this series! I love the sound hardware from these 8 and 16 bit systems and snes was always one of my favorite. Can't wait for the other parts.
So happy that you're back!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I already know this is gonna be my favorite series from you!
Though I don't know much about it, the SNES sound system is actually my favorite (comparing it to stuff like MID, MOD, XM, or IT). I'm glad you've been able to get to it. Your other videos have helped me gain a better grasp on how my favorite consoles work, in conjunction with dev manuals, and observation on my own. I'm hoping I can do a series similar to yours with the AGB, my favorite handheld. Sadly, its audio system is not as elegant as the SNES. It's just 4B buffer of 8b playback. My dad and I are actually dissecting a dead GAME BOY micro (the charging port is thrashed). Thankfully, it's ONLY AGB stuff. Every other AGB has not AGB stuff. Your videos have also helped me with the rendering in a game I'm making (I might also make an engine for FDS, SFC, CGB and AGB). Anyway. I love computers. I love your work. I'd love to do what you do, but for the AGB.
Older SNES emulator do have feature where you can save the music as 8-channels .MOD file.
THANK YOU FOR THIS!!!!
I missed these so much!
I thought this was a video about SCP due to misreading the title. I was not disappointed though.
OOOH I'm so looking forward to this
I'm not gonna pretend that I always understand what you're explaining in a video, but I will unreservedly say that I've enjoyed every one nonetheless.
I truly love these videos.
Not that i understand much, but man is this interesting and calming video, thank you!
8:53 there's a fun audio glitch after "16 bits".
glad you're back!
Glad to see you back and still going strong! I really like your elaborate explanations and detailed knowledge of the topics you learn us. Thanks a lot!
if I had a channel like this one when I had more patience I would definitely make my own snes game
LETS GOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
these videos are so good theyre probably more addictive than crack
im so excited for the series bro
Welcome back my man!
You need to collab with Summoning Salt, the result would be phenomenal
Yes!!! You’re back!
Oh good! I was beginning to wonder whether it was going to happen!! Thank you so much for making these, and welcome back!! Take it easy if you can!
I really hope the cartridge audio pins will be covered since from what I understand they basically allow bypassing most of the subsystem to stream in audio samples directly, allowing for things like the MSU-1.
Thanks for the subtitles.
8:50 thought my ears were playing tricks on me
Oooh, SPC time! I am HERE for this!
YES, thank you for making this serires, i have been working on a SPC player, using the actual SPC from a dead SNES
Great video! It'd be interesting to see a list of tracks that can't be saved as .spc. The only one that I can think of off the top of my head is the intro theme from Tales of Phantasia, which has full lyrics and has (had?) issues being played in emulators.
I think some of the DKC games had songs like this, as well as potentially Super Star Wars from all the samples?
Earthworm Jim 2
can't wait for the rest of the series!!!
FINALLY !!!!!!!!
The master comes back!
Welcome back!!
I always love these
Welcome back! Love these videos as an amateur rom hacker
8:54 Sounds like Heavy in TF2 eating a Sandvich.
Another banger!
Our king has returned
It Lives!
Yes! More videos on how the SNES works!
Stay up brother! Glad you're back
Amazing video as always! Ironically, there seems to be a slight audio glitch just before the discussion of the DAC.
Your videos are pure gold!!
Never clicked on a notification this fast
Welcome back
babe wake up RGME dropped a new video
Thank you so much for your amazing work.
LET'S GOOOOOO I WAS BINGING YOUR VIDEOS AND I'M REALLY GLAD YOU RELEASED A NEW ONE
8:53 editing error?
yay new series! i missed this
Уникальный контент, спасибо!
Very interesting stuff.
Holy crap, the only other person too go into depth about how this works is David Wise. Yes, that David Wise from Rare.
Excelent video! i want to mention that the main theme of Chrono Trigger is one example of a song that doesn't fit in just one SPC file.
Also, Dancing Mad (FF6) has to be split up as well, because it's actually 5 tracks that the game seamlessly weaves together in response to your gameplay.
amazing video as always :)
I don't know anything about the SPC700, but boy that overview (with the exception of linking the A & Y registers) looks a lot like a 6502 architecture.