Printable View
I've always wondered whether the terrible voice quality in the Thunder Force games was the product of a bad sound driver or bad recordings. I'm leaning towards the driver being the problem, as Technosoft's driver can't even play samples and music at the same time. Would modifying the sound driver be able to fix the awful voice quality?
They're bad samples except Thunder Force 2 which has voice quality which blows away the following Thunder Force games. So the samples will always sound like that or worse no matter what you do. A new driver would help a new game to have better samples. But it can't fix existing samples.
ThunderForce's sound driver is one of the few that I know of that loses FM or PSG instruments when other sound effects play, such as the shot sound. I have no idea why that is, but it causes the music to be missing instruments or depth while actually playing.
I followed a tutorial on ripping samples from Genesis games, and while the samples don't sound great, I think they sound better than when they're played in game (these are from TF4): https://www.dropbox.com/s/ygkz78nu25...4%20Voices.wav
Here's the tutorial. I had to fiddle with the sample rate a bit to get the samples to sound right: http://chipmusic.org/forums/topic/46...esis-bin-roms/
"Blade" and "Rail gun" sound like "Roadie" and "Road gun" to me.
Technosoft's Genesis games are probably the most notable example of samples and music not playing at the same time on the console. Speaking of TFII, the samples on the original Sharp X68000 version are much more clearer, and don't cut off the music either.
Slightly off-topic, but has anyone else noticed how several Genesis racing games are unable to play music and sfx simultaneously? The Lotus games, Top Gear 2 and Outrun immediately come to mind. They offered the option of playing either or, but not simultaneously. I wonder why that was, were the developers unable to find a solution or was it just laziness on their part?
I would think the Lotus games were like that because they were Amiga ports and Amiga games could seldom play sfx and music at the same time. Add to that, laziness.
The Genesis' limited amount of sound channels, that's why. The music makes use of most, if not all of the channels, which requires some instrumentation to be dropped when sfx play. It's common in many Genesis games really, and to a lesser extent SNES games.Quote:
Originally Posted by sheath
Lotus was probably just laziness, since it's an Amiga port, and the low number of sound channels on that system meant it couldn't do both simultaneously. Outrun was probably a case of trying to ensure the highest music quality possible.
That's strange, since the Mega Drive has more sound channels than the SNES.Quote:
Originally Posted by Aarzak
But a lot of devs didn't use the PSG, so they ended up having less channels.
Since the laziest devs used sound drivers like GEMs and whatnot I highly doubt the PSG was excluded more often than not.
What really puzzles me is how Konami managed to completely ignore the PSG in CV Bloodlines. They're usually pretty good with sound.
It could have been a conscious decision by the development team to do that for all we know. - Do the other Konami games use PSG ?Quote:
Originally Posted by superandroidtron
PS: Matt Furniss rarely if ever used PSG. Not sure if the Krysalis sound driver he used even supported PSG? In his interview here at Sega-16 he specifically recommends to use all available sound chips and -channels, yet his own work on MD does not seem to follow that guideline.
I tested a few games with music by Matt Furniss: Boogerman, Chuck Rock II and Wiz 'n' Liz. At least the intros and first levels were completely silent with the YM2612 off.