Road Rash CD [Probably silly question]

[Joe Redifer]

If Mega CD Road Rash streams anything but the crappy audio, I can't fathom what it might be because like I said, the tracks don't take up much space. They are not enhanced in any way over the 4 meg cart. The 32-bit versions are irrelevant to the discussion of the Mega CD version streaming or not.

And I own the PS1 Road Rash (US version). It plays the same exact audio during the races as the 3DO version... MIDI. In fact, I used the PS1 version to make this video here:



The Saturn version plays the same MIDI, but it sounds different from what I remember (and has a faster framerate than the other versions). The Sega CD version is the only one to play the band music during the race.

[kool kitty89]

And I wasn't sure if you had read my post about the 32-bit versions streaming as talking about the Mega-CD too.

Interestingly, the PC version uses midi too. I would have thought that if any version was likely to use digital audio it would have been that one.

There's a lot of CD games that had tons of empty space on the disc but opted for realtime synthesis (midi is a bit of a misnomer as only some such tracks are actually using midi, others could use something very different -though you get the point across more or less -unless you want to be more specific: chiptunes might be more applicable though, even if they're wavetable stuff -or MOD files liek the Amiga or Sega CD PCM chip tends to use -SNES is somewhat like MOD too). Anything using General midi would always apply though. (ie many online and downloadable PC games among others)

It's more than just semantics and TmEE corrected me a while ago on the topic. (in particular context of Silpheed's realtime synthesis on the Sega CD -with the PCM chip usin more of a MOD format and not midi as I was suggesting)

And "real music" is more of a misnomer though, as realtime synthesis is most definitely real music as well. (and some CD audio tracks use synthesis hardware that could be replicated on several home consoles or computers)

One reason is that even with all that space you still run into time constraints and often have to curtail tracks, though you could do a mix of CD-DA with synth supplementing that (like in Sonic CD with all the past music synthesized by the console). Popful Mail optes for almost exclusively hardware synth for in-game music (with only 3 CD tracks used manly for the title and ending, plus other streaming audio -not red book but lower quality PCM- in the cutscenes as well), in that case it might also be to facilitate red book vioce clips in-game, though there's other options there too.
There's also the fact that realtime synth can be much more dynamic (or more easily so) and change depending on what happens in-game, or especially have a composit of succeding changes in certain cases (Lucas Arts's IMUSE comes to mind -like in Monkey Island 2, X-Wing, and TIe Fighter, or Origin's music in the wing commander games up to WCIII). You can manage that with streaming audio too, but it requires tracks to be cut into lots of segments and very fast seeking to avoid lag (Wing Commander IV streamed it from the harddrive I think, and using wav files, not red book -most such PC games used wav, or later compressed audio like mp3 in some cases, and it's still not as dynamic as midi/realtime synth in some cases).

However, poor quality synthesized music can really kill those advantages, while good synth can still sound great (it depends somewhat on the hardware, but in the Saturn's case you've got tons to work with, even though only sample based synthesis was normally used, wasting much of the potential and not taking advantag eof flexibility and additional capability with the DSP and 68k -pretty much ever sound system to use such on a game console was largely wasted, including the SNES, Jaguar, PlaySatation, 3DO, and Dreamcast; with surround sound and maybe some filtering or deompression being the most advanced features pushed -and often then still only meriting much simpler hardware, and on top of that most later console sdidn't tend to use synth music at all, so the sound system was generally used for sfx and voice playback and possible decompression of streaming audio -The N64 went for a much more general pupsose route using the CPU or RSP to drive audio -with simple DMA mixing I think, more like onboard sound on later consoles and most PCs- and even so it actually has several cases of streaming decompressed audio -Some Lucas Arts titles in particular, like Episode I racer, much of it seems to be streamded compressed audio- the Jaguar was a little like that in that in being general purpose, but the DSP/RISC processor intended for sound had a very constricted bus interface that made it unsuitable for many other tasks without headache).


And you can have bad compostions od streaming audio too... In Road Rash's case, the Saturn version does seem a bit weak, some of the tracks sound liek they might be pretty decent, but the volume is so low, it's almsot inaudible. (is there sfx/msuci volume control in the options menu?)


The General Midi tunes ont he PC sound pretty good though:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO4211ff7J0

[Silanda]

The General Midi tunes ont he PC sound pretty good though:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO4211ff7J0

Sadly it doesn't work properly with external MIDI modules, forcing me to use the crappy Microsoft Synth (though to be fair it does sound ok in this game).

[Hans-CD]

If Mega CD Road Rash streams anything but the crappy audio, I can't fathom what it might be because like I said, the tracks don't take up much space. They are not enhanced in any way over the 4 meg cart. The 32-bit versions are irrelevant to the discussion of the Mega CD version streaming or not.

And I own the PS1 Road Rash (US version). It plays the same exact audio during the races as the 3DO version... MIDI. In fact, I used the PS1 version to make this video here:



The Saturn version plays the same MIDI, but it sounds different from what I remember (and has a faster framerate than the other versions). The Sega CD version is the only one to play the band music during the race.

Thank you about the heads up for the NTSC road Rash version... and here i was going to buy it this morning on ebay.

Seemed too good to be true.
And it s true the SS version has a higher framerate.

[sheath]

Road Rash Saturn vs PS1
Part 2

Divx required, K-Lite recommended. I thought the PS1 game has the same music as the Sega CD game in the US. Or at least, the long box version did. I guess that is just louder midi with more real sounding instruments than the Saturn version though.