So someone reverse enginered the sound driver Capcom user in Street Fighter 2 Ce for Mega Drive and decides to wrote his own driver. The result you can see and hear here: http://t.co/MovmNwj4HA Street Fighter 2 sounds amazing now! Shame on you Capcom! And kudos for the hacking!
Man, they really did clear up the voices. Capcom was probably trying to get it out for the so-important-if-you-miss-it-the-game-gets-cancelled Christmas season (still not over Sonic Xtreme)
Yeah, this has been talked about over on the Sega16 boards. I just combo'd this with Pryon's SF2 color hack, and the result is outstanding! It's like the game that should have been released.
But the lousy sound driver is also used in Super Street Fighter 2 as well....... So yeah, that's awesome work. Wow I was just suprised that porters can drop the ball on due to bad drivers and the hardware gets blamed for it. I feel regret for bashing the Genesis sampling quality now. It just needs better programmers then.
Ya know, as I said in my most recent video (which I'm not above plugging), the Genesis could make some beautiful music, devs of the time were just lazy, or concentrated on the SNES because they focused on the Japanese market (where the SFC quadrupled the sales of the MD, but the MD/Genesis were more popular in Europe and North America).
Well to elaborate on my earlier post, I never doubted that it just requires the sound/music engineer to either research thoroughly or they would just need to change their style of music to fit the Genesis/MD FM sound chip better. (Immediate example that come to mind are Streets of Rage 2 and Thunder Force 3.) But I always hear and remember that the genesis voice sampling is "bad/scratchy" compared to the SNES in which most point to Street Fighter as an example. So I guess this just means most Genesis/Megadrive voice samples just needed extensive optimizations? I mean with his improved sound driver the Genesis SF2 voice samples are almost the exact same quality as the PC-Engine / Turbografx 16 samples. Which is just darn impressive to say the least.
This just shows how lazy Capcom was when doing games for the Mega Drive. This goes all back to the famous "bias" to Nintendo back then...
Fantastic work on the new sound driver. I've alwyas had faith in the MD sound chip though since good Japanese devs always got some great stuff out of it unlike the shit 99% of western devs churned out.
This goes to show how much people & devs of the time were dickriding Nintendo hard smdh! I've always had faith in the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive as well
The audio subsystem in the SNES basically operated with samples - so if you loaded up one of the channels with a sampled version of speech and disabled the envelope generator and played the sample at the correct rate, you got the audio coming out with very little effort. The audio subsystem in the Genesis was an FM synthesizer - good for generating instrument sounds, but not so good for speech. Having said that, one of the channels could be put into bypass mode so that you could directly write (8-bit, linear) PCM to the DAC. The problem was that you had to do this in your own code, and the accuracy of the timing on the Z80 directly affected the accuracy of the timing on the output data. On top of this, it was only 8 bit, so you really needed to use as much of the DAC range as possible. All of this is possible, but the sample code supplied by Sega didn't do it, and people often just use the sample stuff. On top of this, digitized audio was more expensive in the Genesis because of it's use of linear PCM - each sample was only 8 bits, but you had to store all 8 of them. The SNES (being a sample based synthesizer) had hardware support for sample compression - so although it had a wider (16 bit) overall dynamic range than the Genesis did, it only stored a bit over 2 bits per sample to do it.
