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OMG version 4 is amazing. Had orgasms here!
I wonder if it is possible to migrate this improvement for all versions of SF2CE. Because I really want to join this improvement with my hack. Would be the definitive version of SF2CE
Edit: I tested with my patch and it works! sexy!
Not yet, i really want to get rid of the missing SFX bug first. I believe i found why it happen (not yet sure), and at same time i just realize the VInt does not work as expected on Z80 side (it is not made pending as on the 68000 CPU, which is a problem in my case).Quote:
Originally Posted by tomaitheous
True... but the main problem is the bus mastering from the DMA, not sure they could avoid it or maybe not in a cheap way. NES did not have any DMA and SNES used chip for something completely different.Quote:
One thing I never understood, is why Sega never made a cheap audio chip on cart. A simple DAC with a small cache, or a self feeding DAC from rom. I mean, NES had waaaayyy more complicated addon chips than that (all sorts of audio chips with more channel and some with extra DACs too). And the SNES put whole CPUs on carts (SA-1).
Nintendo also had a cartridge manufacturing empire in Japan that, as far as I can tell, Sega never even approached and much higher cartridge sales expectations world wide. I would not be surprised if we some day find out that the decision was as simple as looking at expected manufacturing numbers and deciding the added cost was not going to benefit the bottom line. Or it could have been a simple policy to stick to the cheapest carts possible and main hardware.
That's a massive improvement. I can't wait to hear what it sounds like when you swap in new samples.
Great to hear that. Finding a way to get rid of that bug would be beyond awesome IMO!Quote:
Originally Posted by Stef
I have to agree with sheath, here.Quote:
Originally Posted by sheath
I'd also add the fact that the MD didn't sell well in Japan, so, despite its success in the rest of the world, SOJ decisions were mostly in the conservative side when MD was involved.
The smaller cart limitation in JP releases is a sign of that. As much as SOA was successful for some time, the head of Sega was in Japan and, there, adding cost to MD carts was probably seen as a crazy decision. Furthermore, IDK if expensive-ish carts would sell in Japan at all. N64 was a huge failure there (I know that a lot of other factors come into play though) and the MD's Virtua Racing didn't exactly set the Japanese world on fire.
OTOH, the Mega CD went relatively well there. By the time you would think about improving the sound of MD games to counter the SNES, around 1992/1993 and on, the Japanese were probably more interested in what the CD could offer both in terms of audio quality, content and lower cost.
But that's just pure speculation from my side.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pyron
Thanks Pyron :) Definitely with your palette patch it does improve a lot the game over the original version.
About the new samples, actually have some of the arcade samples but they are different from the one in the MD version, for instance i have only voices and not the SFX (any hit sound, wood box breaking...), and voices are not 100% matching. I think it will be complicated to replace current samples with ones of better quality :-/
If someones has ideas about it...
PC-Engine version have a nice variation of sfx and voices samples. In this departament he is the best version of 16 bit era and thats samples maybe matchs well in genesis version.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stef
That might be a solution but they are 5 bits, using them on megadrive i will probably have to degrade them in 4 bits.
Use every arcade sample you have, forcing length match, reuse anything else :PQuote:
Originally Posted by Stef
What about for instance "24 bit, wav, 44.100 hz audio" ? Doesn't that describe cd quality audio ? Or, "320 kps, mp3". I understand your point though for md, very insightful. Ok, 4 bit 12 khz for most sounds was the general range I guess besides pcm or fm / synth ? Sure, I won't count synth sound frequencies, I didn't know that could be 50+ khz for md, but I just wondered about sampled audio voices or most beats on md. I can't even get 22.000 hz wavs to play on my everdrive and Genesis even though mega everdrive says it can. Maybe I need another program to decompress them to 22, then put on sd card and plug into my mega everdrive that goes in my genesis and that goes into my stereo.Quote:
Originally Posted by Barone
Yes I played sf2 in the arcades I believe in 1992 and it sounded good, I don't think it was a 16 to 24 bit 44.100 hz wav or anything, but I'm surprised it was only 4 bit 11 khz but I remember it being very superior to cart console versions. Great post btw.Quote:
The arcade samples of SFII are nowhere near to 44 kHz. Have you ever played that game on the arcades?
Something like 4-bit 11 kHz samples playback would make it hard for you to notice any difference between the MD version and the arcade version if they were using the same samples and mostly identical compositions.
First of all thanks to you both for your time explaining and all the info. The more info, the better for me so no worries. No, I wouldn't want you to do a 12 bit 22 khz audio quality update, that is way too much work, if it sounds great in 4 bit 8 to 12 khz sound that is cool. I'm sure rom version 5 will be great. Great post btw.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stef
.wav is a Windows or PC format, it says very little about the audio or its quality aside from that it is uncompressed. I forget if Genesis samples are VGZ or VGM or something else entirely, but this is why Stef has mentioned the frequency and bitdepth and occasionally ADPCM (a compression format).
-edit-
I had a chance to play through the latest version with Pyron's final color hack last night. I think most of the scratchiness that hits my ears, over my M1 HDG SCD 1 out and through my dolby prologic tuner, must be related to the bit depth. It is noticeably cleaner, but I still hear most of the same scratchiness as before, it just doesn't sound like they are gargling water at times. ;) I think this driver, as is, would have been much better for avoiding the press complaints at least, it just sounds like an old radio or something.
On Pyron's color hack, I have some observations to be taken or left as is. Certain stages, like Ryu's or Guile's were noticeably different/better over 32X Composite on my SDTV and my LCD TV. I can't speak to arcade accuracy at all, but I would say these stages are clear improvements. I'm not sure what the final list of stage changes looks like, but I couldn't tell the difference on the other stages unless I'm forgetting one. I even had my old comparison video up on the LCD to compare the same output of the original with the color hack, most of the levels looked different because my LCD displays color differently than my CRT and I wasn't able to tell if that was the difference or if it was the hack. I still need to test it over RGB, which I can record now through a Component converter too.
I wonder though, whether Capcom was targeting Composite rather than RGB. I think in some cases the differences between these color choices is negligible over Composite.
Very cool to know that you are from "gamepilgrimage". Accompanying this site a long time and has great comparisons but needs to be updated for everyone to have access to that good content again.Quote:
Originally Posted by sheath
About the hack always is recommended playing the original before to notice the differences as well. Here I always test on my model1 in Svideo and composite and the differences are stark.
A while ago I made a video showing some differences side by side, if you can ignore my voice can be interesting to watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOqk...l=GabrielPyron
Ah, yeah I hadn't surfed your YT channel yet. I don't think the more subtle changes were as obvious because I was looking at my video on the LCD and the new colors on CRT.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pyron
On Gamepilgrimage, what content is blocked?
some videos you need divx plugin to watch and that plugin sucks, in some linux distribution thats dosen't works at all. I think you can use dailymotion or youtube for this stuff.Quote:
Originally Posted by sheath
and now i see you fixed the broken imagens. nice job!
Oh, yeah, the archive site had a lot of broken links due to switching from a Windows to Linux server. I left them dead unless somebody asked me to restore them, otherwise I added the pics to the game pages on the new sites. On DIVX, I have found it just as good as Xvid for video quality, and better for fast motion. Also, for the longest time DIVX was the only format that could handle gameplay and not crash my computer during compression.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pyron
Using Daily Motion or Youtube blurs the videos, which makes the comparisons less authentic. I have offered YT and Divx versions of my latest videos, but recompressing them in any way will further blur the image quality. I didn't have enough hard drive space to keep the original gameplay videos or Premiere Pro projects, and a lot of these videos need to be redone in RGB/S-Video/Component maximum bitrate anyway. It'll be a while before I have the spare time to make updated comparison videos for all of the old content.
My first priority is the Console History section, which needs to have all of the magazines and primary sources cited. At least with that I can work on it 15 minutes here and there and not get lost. Youtubers are doing a good enough job of videoing gameplay anyway, when I started GP it was mainstream media or a couple of hobbyist sites with super low res videos. I'm less motivated to do comparison vids today since everybody MUST use Youtube and you can just watch two videos back to back.
About my wav example, I typed "16 or 24 bit, 44.100 hz, wav file". That tells you the quality, actually tells you everything. Most wavs, are cdda (cd audio) ripped from cd's. That's how I do it, I take the cd, rip it in my programs highest quality possible, which is 44.1 wav. Also wavs I d/l are 44.1 cd quality which are huge files maybe 40mb per song. Now making a 22 khz wav for mega everdrive is proving difficult to actually get it to work on my genesis. If you play a cd (cdda) out your stereo, then play a wav copy of it from your computer hooked up to same stereo, there is basically no quality difference. I believe wav is just another form of cdda or mpeg4 anyway.
To start with the megadrive is not able to play stereo PCM so that is already a big difference. Then you have 8 bits sounds versus 16 bits sounds, not a big difference but you can heard it.
If you want, you have an example of a 32 Khz test on megadrive here :
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...le-snd-32k.bin
Did you upload them on youtube yet?
Do you speak about SF2 driver comparison videos ? I plan to fix the missing SFX bug before doing it (unfortunately i was not yet able to figure it).
Stef after you fix that bug you gonna try change de fx samples too ?
fx samples ? unfortunately i have only better quality samples for voices (which comes from the CPS-2 version) but not for the sound effect. I might try with the PCE samples but the quality is probably not much better (higher bit rate but lower bit resolution).
Could you do that demo with another song? Or at least provide some noob friendly resources to build it?Quote:
Originally Posted by Stef
Why can't we give Stef a break while he's working on his driver? Who gives a fuck about demos and comparisons of WIP stuff when the guy is trying to fix SFIISCE's sound?
Seriously.
Because that work is done. Some awesome demos don't shine as they should because of not proper selections of what to display/reproduce. Just when Tiido did that wonderful audio engine and used a Tempo tune, totally unable to show how good his tool is.Quote:
Originally Posted by Barone
I'm just asking, not demanding.
Stef i'm a noob here but i want to help, i have a mp3 tune with all sf2 fx sounds and its easly to rip and convert with audacity for example.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stef
What is the restrictions that you must follow to fx sounds be change ?
As soon the file is in WAV format i can easily work with it. Of course having the best quality would be preferable, i dunno about your MP3 but i think it won't degrade too much as base samples are not that great anyway. Ideally it would be awesome to have one WAV file per sample but that is a huge work (85 samples to process) !
Here's the original WAV file containing all samples of the MD version :
https://www.dropbox.com/s/m0nudiaih1...f2_samples.wav
You can test all sample from my test rom :
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...f2/sf2_drv.bin
If i want to use better quality samples (let's say 12 Khz for instance), i need to replace all samples with 12 Khz version... I believe some samples used in the MD version are not seen in other versions. Of course we still can use oversampled version of original samples in the worth case ;)
Honestly it's very easy to build a rom to play the sample you want at 32 Khz with SGDK :Quote:
Originally Posted by dr apocalipsis
https://code.google.com/p/sgdk/
You can have a look on the "sound" sample to see how it work but basically to play a sample you just need to call 1 method :
where sample is just a WAV file you declared as resource.Quote:
SND_startPlay_PCM(sample, sizeof(sample), SOUND_RATE_32000, SOUND_PAN_CENTER, FALSE);
Stef I leave here one WAV file in perfect quality.
Cut file for you think waste of time because I do not know the exact length of the corresponding file in the original mega drive then you would have to do it anyway.
But if you open at any audio editor will see that they are well separated and easy to edit.
If this file is useful to you I have another with the same conditions for the voices if you want.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/v5lc712feb...COLLECTION.wav
Thanks Pyron, it will be useful for some of the FX i believe :) Anyway i take any materials i can found and will see how to work with them later :)
Cool Stef, so if it can help here was all voices in high quality
https://www.dropbox.com/s/pw7e4y23ij...COLLECTION.wav
Thanks !
Not to derail or chime in with more requests, but is this driver by any chance going to facilitate more sound hacks for Genesis games? I would really like to see samples improved in pretty much every Sega Arcade port, especially the Golden Axe games.
I'd imagine it probably wouldn't be an easy drop in replacement. Each game is coded differently so you would probably have to reverse engineer each ones sound driver to figure out how to swap in the new one. And after you did that there would still be no guarantee that the new engine would be compatible and work.Quote:
Originally Posted by sheath
Definitely this version sounds much better, even with the original samples.:D
What is the source of those samples?Quote:
Originally Posted by Pyron
Excellent work!Quote:
Originally Posted by Stef
quick feedback: Continue countdown voice sample for "4" doesn't play.
Would love to hear v4 with these samples for a test:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Christuserloeser
http://www.squareenixmusic.com/revie...r2arcade.shtmlQuote:
Originally Posted by Black_Tiger
I've recorded quick and dirty a couple of samples from the original game and from your reprogrammed engine, to show a Nintendo oriented friend, and it's still impressive and different as night and day.
Using real hardware, everdrive, and smartphone.
I think your work should be commended and should be spread to the press.
I really hope you manage to fix the missing samples, even if some games, like Fatal Fury 2, have the same problem.
You're comparing different things. FF2 uses an audio driver which is designed to have just 1 PCM channel in order to have good playback quality. It's not a bug that makes it cut samples, it was programmed that way.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tor Landeel
Stef's driver was built around the Crapcom's driver, which was designed to support 2 PCM channels. So when it's playing one PCM and cuts to play another or just misses the drums sample for no good reason it's a bug that Stef is trying to fix.