I've seen videos of firecore-based handheld genesis consoles and I'd always wondered why the sound quality is so consistently terrible on them? I'd always been under the impression that Sega Genesis emulation was easier to pull off than the SNES for exemple. Is there any particular reason why those devices sound like they do, any technological constraints whatsoever?
I don't think the bad sound has to do with the hardware per se but rather the actual emulator At@Games used for their systems, IDK what they used but whatever emulator At@Games used for their Genesis/Mega Drive systems had poor sound emulation to begin with (not to mention the graphical oddities) so naturally that poor sound emulation would carry over to any firecore-based hardware that used said emulator, as for why AT@Games never updated the emulator to fix these sound issues, from what I understand At@Games lost contact with whoever was programming the emulator and At@games was never given the source code to fix it (or something along those lines), fortunately at least last time I checked At@Games is going to be using a brand new emulator for the model slated to be released later this year (which looks pretty kick ass with that model 1 design IMHO) and if that's indeed the case HOPEFULLY the sound issues that the older emulator had will be a thing of the past.
Hopefully it will be fixed, because it is terrible, but I'm not pre-ordering the thing because I'm still wary.
But Genesis Plus GX, Fusion and few others do it fine. Not 100% accurate maybe, and sound is different even in different models of original Sega consoles, but at least it's not an ear rape like firecore-based hardware. Even those emulators that had sound in late 90s had waay better sound.
That's a Radica Genesis system which is a completely different system (not to mention being long out of production) to the At@Games systems which you can usually find at a Dollar General or Family Dollar (or a local equivalent if you don't have either of those store chains in your area), the Radica system is an actual GOAC (Genesis On A Chip) which basically means it's a hardware clone of a Genesis system and can have hardware mods that can fix problems since the system is hardware based, the At@Games Genesis on the other hand is a firecore based cpu running a Genesis emulator (and a very poor emulator to boot if you ask me) so no matter what you do to the hardware, the sound you get will never change as the system is software based, hopefully if the reports are right and this years upcoming model is actually using a new emulator, and if the trailer for it is anything to go by, the days of bad emulation are finally going to be behind us, then again it could just be all hype but only time will tell.
Apparently ATgames finally got the Genesis right the hd Genesis coming out soon supposedidly has ACCURATE SOUND
Not that i take gamespot as a good review source... but holy shit: "Do Not Buy AtGames' Sega Genesis Flashback Console" https://www.gamespot.com/sega-genesis-flashback-classic-console-review/ 21st century Tectoy and AtGames really excell at the crap products department. @Yakumo now i really think those chinese Megadrive HDMI knock-offs available on Aliexpress might be "Ages" better than anything made by them. http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?32463-Fei-Hao-MD-clone-with-HDMI-out
