With all the discussion about the mini nes the At Games Genesis/Mega Drive has been brought up which is notorious for its horrendous audio. My question is why is it so hard to get Genesis/Mega Drive audio right? I know there have been various board revision with sound differences but they still sound similar in a sense. I mean is it really that hard to replicate that Yamaha chip? Even emulation likes the ps2 sega ages or dreamcast demul it's been an issue. Yet systems like the snes seem don't to have many issues sound wise when it comes to clones or emulation and that had customized Sony chip set.
One problem I've always noticed with emulating Sonic games is that whenever a ring is collected, one layer of music will be cut off while the ring collecting sound is heard. This I have noticed on every emulated Sonic game on every system I've ever played. It drives me nuts. It's most noticeable during Ice Cap Zone from Sonic 3
Even real hardware is not crystal audio perfect. I have a Model 1 High def (use the headphone jack hooked up for stereo output) and noticed the same games sound better on the SNES!
That's not at all what I'm talking about.. Each console has a specific sound. When that sound messes up in emulation, it takes me out of the illusion that I'm playing the real game. Sound skips, pops, reproduction errors, it's all like nails on a chalkboard.
This happens on real hardware, for just about any console chiptune based audio system. They only have so many channels to work with. Often having to interrupt others to play sound effects. As far as getting the sound right, it's probably somewhat difficult. As all things, but really the facts of the matter are more likely that they don't give a shit. And don't care about quality. Or that it's just "Good enough". Look at the Retron5, and now just imagine how much worse the emulation would be if they wrote it themselves instead of stealing it.
Look at the SID emulation efforts. It's not easy to simulate audio chips perfectly and the analog bits of the signal chain aren't helping. I don't get it why the clone consoles have overdriven amplifiers though. That seems avoidable with a little bit of effort.
at games is junk even this really cheap handheld i bought for about $14 like 4 years ago dose a way better job with audio then anything made by atgames i really don't know how at games can emulate audio so bad
This is an important point. The actual official Sega Genesis systems have varying audio quality. Some are pretty good, others are pretty poor. Then there are modifications people do to make it sound better. There are emulators that do a good job, but ofcourse there are others that don't. If it's software emulation then the reason for poor quality could both be poor emulation of the sound components or maybe a lack of processing power to correctly simulate it at high quality. Bad programming, bugs, anything is possible. For hardware clones, poor implementation of audio outputs circuits could be part of it. Or cloning inaccuracies or bugs. The NES clones often have a bug in the sound section that causes serious music glitches in many games. The SNES by comparison did not have significant differences in sound quality or sound hardware from different revisions. I think some Genesis systems used the Yamaha chips, and then some used clones. I think later systems combined a lot of chips into single ASICs. Another important thing is that for many people they don't really notice poor sound quality just like others don't really notice poor video quality. So that supports the "it's good enough" idea mentioned by Vosse.
