Thunder Force Voices

I love it when your about to enter a level in Thunder Force II and some guy says something on the lines of, "regrfrgrg lava, good luk".

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Originally Posted by Aarzak

Speaking of TFII, the samples on the original Sharp X68000 version are much more clearer, and don't cut off the music either.

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Only the opening male voice sounds noticeably better on the Sharp X68000 version (which I have right here) and it still sounds like ass. The female voice sounds about the same, no clearer. Maybe a bit louder but volume≠clarity. The female voices sound very clear on the Genesis, it's just that she can't pronounce a word to save her life.

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Originally Posted by sheath

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.

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Halting music playback for samples (aside from a few games like Panorama Cotton that do it intentionally "ducking" the volume when speech plays -hance why drum samples ARE used in music too) the problem is pretty much down to poorly coded Z80 drivers with mutually exclusive synth handling and PCM handling code.

Sega's own pre-SMPS Z80 drivers do just that, though they also quite often had decent quality samples too (like Space Harrier 2 and Altered Beast, less so for Golden Axe). The two ways around this issue are: coding a better sound driver that can handle PCM playback without halting synth updates, or using a 68k based sound engine. And many Z80 drivers handling PCM and music are the ones with problematic PCM timing in general. (though given the sample rates commonly used, I really wonder why more didn't resort to the rather foolproof method of timer polling used in GEMS . . . for >10 kHz that's not really usable, but tons of games worked within that range)

It is odd for 68k based drivers or PCM-exclusive Z80 drivers to have severe PCM timing issues, but it's also not unheard of given Capcom's horrible 68k driver (in that case, 68k conflicts on the Z80 bus seem to be a major problem, given the results of halting the 68k), so this may be the case with Technosoft.

From what I can hear, it's a combination of problems ranging from poor quality (low bitrate and poorly optimized) samples/recordings, heavy accents of the actual voices used, and quite possible uneven PCM playback as well.

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Originally Posted by superandroidtron

What really puzzles me is how Konami managed to completely ignore the PSG in CV Bloodlines. They're usually pretty good with sound.

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Kind of a shame really though . . . PSG could have improved several of those tracks in Bloodlines, or good use of PSG at least. Hell, good PSG synth drums would probably be better sounding than the super weak FM drums used in that game . . . samples would obviously be better though.

And if they REALLY wanted all 6 FM channels and didn't care about PSG, they could always have gone the After Burner II route of using PSG-PCM sample playback. (really not that bad if you're going to use pretty low bitrate samples anyway, especially if you optimize reasonably well for PSG formatted samples -ABII did a pretty decent job for both music and speech/SFX there . . . and did 2 channel playback even with music samples and speech/sfx)
Still, ABII is the only game to use this method on the MD.
Using PSG for music and/or SFX directly is generally much more useful . . . especially if you can actually manage decent quality 8-bit PCM samples through the YM2612's DAC, or decent compression formats too. Technically, even linear 4-bit PCM should be better sounding than 4-bit nonlinear PSG samples, since that's the way the volume works on the SN76489 (you could also use 2 or 3 channels to better approximate 8-bit PCM, and decode 8-bit samples via look-up-table, but that adds to overhead and the DAC will still sound significantly better -this method is used much more often on the Atari ST, but it's also better off with the higher res nonlinear volume of the AY8910 -or YM2149 rather). Several other PSGs use linear volume and thus don't have that trade-off though, as such, Atari's POKEY can do 4-bit PCM (as can TIA), same for the C64's SID, NES can do 4-bit too but also 7-bit (if the DMC channel is off), and the Lynx has 8-bit volume on each of its 4 channels. (PC Engine uses 5-bit PCM mini-samples for its sound, and you can use the CPU to drive 5-bit PCM streams too, or use the per-channel volume to set 2 channels up as a single 10-bit channel, very useful for software mixing and/or ADPCM decoding)

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Originally Posted by Zebbe

That's strange, since the Mega Drive has more sound channels than the SNES.

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Touche. I swear, that avatar......it winked at me.

The first time I played Thunder Force 2, my immediate reaction to the intro voice was "what did he say about ladders?"

So, bad voice samples and awesome music.Since there's no one singing in the TF games, sounds like a good deal to me.
After all, it is a space shooter, not some movie-like game.

I think I have to be the only one that actually likes the voice samples in the Thunder Force games. They sound a lot cleaner to me than a lot of other games!

Now then, Every now and then the voice samples in this game seem to sound very very clear. In particular, I notice it most often when the music changes to the foreboding theme at the mid boss's entrance in the space station stage; if you pick up the CRAW at this moment the gurgle of the sample disappears leaving a clear voice.

This leads me to wonder if the effect is deliberate, maybe to sound robotic / radio staticky?

Anyone else ever notice this?

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Originally Posted by retrospiel

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 ?

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.

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The other Konami games that don't use the PSG are Lethal Enforcers 1 (the sequel does use it), TMNT Tournament Fighters, and Double Dribble. Even Rocket Knight Adventures, Michiru Yamane's previous soundtrack on the system, uses PSG.

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Originally Posted by GeckoYamori

The other Konami games that don't use the PSG are Lethal Enforcers 1 (the sequel does use it), TMNT Tournament Fighters, and Double Dribble. Even Rocket Knight Adventures, Michiru Yamane's previous soundtrack on the system, uses PSG.

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Animaniacs, Contra: Hard Corps and Buster's Hidden Treasure don't use PSG, either.





And yeah, maybe it was a style choice. Who knows?

The voice samples in Thunder Force IV for the weapon power ups are hilariously bad. Railgun="Whale gun!" Claw="Craw!" Hunter="Cunter!" Blade="Brader!". The voice sample for the weapon "Snake!" sounds somewhat accurate though along with "1up!"

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Originally Posted by Txai

Animaniacs, Contra: Hard Corps and Buster's Hidden Treasure don't use PSG, either.

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You're right. in_vgm plugin listed SEGA PSG as being used, but in practice there was nothing happening in those channels.

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Originally Posted by cleeg

Now then, Every now and then the voice samples in this game seem to sound very very clear. In particular, I notice it most often when the music changes to the foreboding theme at the mid boss's entrance in the space station stage; if you pick up the CRAW at this moment the gurgle of the sample disappears leaving a clear voice.

This leads me to wonder if the effect is deliberate, maybe to sound robotic / radio staticky?

Anyone else ever notice this?

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It's a side effect of the way the PCM playback is handled by its audio driver. It has no buffering for those PCM samples and no time "window" reserved for the playback AFAIK. So the quality of the samples playback varies according to what's going on in terms of processing/bus concurrence when the playback is happening. In other words, in the sound test menu you should be able to get a noticeably better quality than in the heated moments of the game. The more push, the worse the quality of the playback.
Other games like Pulseman have the same issue.

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Originally Posted by Barone

It's a side effect of the way the PCM playback is handled by its audio driver. It has no buffering for those PCM samples and no time "window" reserved for the playback AFAIK. So the quality of the samples playback varies according to what's going on in terms of processing/bus concurrence when the playback is happening. In other words, in the sound test menu you should be able to get a noticeably better quality than in the heated moments of the game. The more push, the worse the quality of the playback.
Other games like Pulseman have the same issue.

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I think I get it, the less the MD has to do at a given moment the more it can do to make the sample sound nicer? And the moment I mentioned just happens to be a window of opportunity that allows a higher quality playback?

Thanks for explaining.