Hello all, Just a thought really. How come music in the Sonic series is so much better than any other music on the Mega Drive? A lot of other music and sound effects sound really electronic and metallic..whereas in Sonic games there are drums, a distinct melody, stereo effects.. Compare, for instance.. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=yzXwutv0yy8 (Sonic 2 Boss) http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=RPYzgCI6Q1I (Hydrocity Act 2) http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=bd8G40yhxNQ (Flying Battery Act 2) to http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=tyF7LB_nd9w ("Worst of Genesis music) http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Wod1sJY7NLI (Comix Zone 1-1-1, consists almost entirely of the 'warpy', metallic sounds I described) http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=-wr9jBb-lEI&feature=related (Kid Chameleon- Cave) Was the Mega Drive's sound chip really difficult to program for? Did Sonic Team use any particular tricks? IMO, the Sonic music holds up really well today, in terms of both composition and sound- whereas a lot of Mega Drive music has descended to just plain 'noise'.. Maybe its just my Sonic fetish talking.. Anyone else have any thoughts?
Sound chips aren't hard to program, but composing good music (a matter of opinion) with them is, especially for a non-musician programmer! Writing a well-rounded sound driver with good "instruments" also can be tricky. Sonic music is good because of it's production value, Sonic team clearly had people familiar with music and of course whatever tools they needed at their disposal, other developers weren't so fortunate (or concerned).
So it's pretty much down to developer effort? I have heard numerous times that the MD sound hardware is weak, how so and how did this impact development?
All sound hardware until multi-channel PCM have numerous limitations and quirks, which can be weaknesses or cleverly turned into strengths under certain circumstances, it's all up to someone's familiarity with the hardware and diverse composition/improvisational skills when met with a limit or quirk.
Most US games use a piss poor sound engine that someone had on here for download at one point. A lot of Japanese developers used a different or made their own sound engine. Technosoft did wonders with the sound chip in the Mega Drive as did Yuzo Koshiro. Chris Hulsbeck also did a pretty good job with the audio on Mega Turrican. Oh, and Konami's Mega Drive sound engine was also fantastic. I'm not having a go at US programmers but if you ever play a game made in the US you'll notice they all sound, well, shit. This is because of their sound engine choice. They mostly all used the same crappy one. It could be a question of taste but personally I don't like the tinny, whinny sound most US programmed Mega Drive games had. There are some exceptions mind you. Accolade made a overhead racer that had awesome techno tracks with really heavy base lines. Yakumo
The Sonic games used PCM samples along with the synth, which can make a major difference. Comix zone music was pure synth, which still sounded good, but other developers were probably just didn't care enough.
I was just playing sonic And Knuckles! From what I know, Sonic 2's music had a helping hand from a pop group, and Sonic 3 etc had some of Micheal Jackon's writers. Yeah, true, but from what I know a lot of the Sonic stuff was done by STI which was Americans and Japanese. I guess that's different though, obviously there going to care about sound quality vs. other devs. Comix Zone and some of the other STI games had music done by Howard Drossin. Comix Zone has awesome music, but the instrumentation is pretty dated. I think that might sum it up the best.
That's what I mean. It's not who composed the music but who made the sound engine. Most programmers were just lazy and used that crappy one. What was it called again? Yakumo
I found a cool link: http://gdri.smspower.org/wiki/index.php/Mega_Drive/Genesis_Sound_Engine_List Also, another few games with some awesome music is Batman and Robin (the cartoon based one), and Vectorman 1 and 2.
So someone posted one of the Genesis sound engines? I'd be very interested if someone actually got ahold of a sound engine as well as the tools for making music to use with it.
Oh my god, I didn't actually view any of those youtube links but I've got the worst music one on now and it truely is horrifying. Pathetic considering how great a job other developers did.
GEMS runs in DOS with it's own GUI which looks a bit corrupted on my laptop. You can get it here: http://www.hidden-palace.org/?releases/console/1
I heard this too. Sonic 3 has some almost identical songs to some Jacko releases, but then he started touching children (or people knew about it more) and SEGA dropped his name from the game.
A lot of them are unfair mainly as I will maintain that Megadrive music sounds better on a real Megadrive (pref a Wondermega with the GAME DAP button pressed in and the effect at 75%) then they do on a emulator. One other game I like the music for is Afterburner II by Dempa, nice digitised drums.
