Posted: 2/10/2006 8:49 PM
Post subject: Question about SNES sound vs. GBA sound.
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AnotherGamer
Former player
Joined: 2/2/2005
Posts: 198
Does the SNES have a better soundchip than GBA, a better internal default instrument sampleset or what? Because I can't figure out why the hell not a single SNES halfassed homebrewn game sounds 8-bit, when countless official, otherwise wellmade GBA games do. I don't really buy into the "it's because it's a handheld system and they're expected to sound worse and thus don't bother to put as much effort into it" excuse either, there's got to be some sort of a technical reason for it.
Posted: 2/10/2006 9:49 PM
Post subject: Re: Question about SNES sound vs. GBA sound.
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nitsuja
Emulator Coder, Skilled player (1310)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
Computer TASer of 2011 TAS of 2011 First edition TAS of 2011 Computer TAS of 2011 Sega TAS of 2010 Sega TAS of 2008 Sega TAS of 2007 Glitchy TAS of 2007
I think the GBA doesn't have a dedicated sound chip (besides direct sound output), like the N64 and unlike the SNES. Which means GBA games don't get any of the audio processing that SNES games had access to for free. It's probably due to the small size of the handheld and/or the cost of adding it. At least, that's all I could gather from a couple of searches...
Posted: 2/11/2006 4:38 AM
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LocalH
Joined: 10/3/2004
Posts: 138
As far as I know, the GBA has the same sound hardware as the original GB, supplemented by two PCM channels which can be fed via DMA to keep CPU load low. So, basically, the "sounds 8-bit" is really just the original GB sound hardware dominating the music. Look at Sonic Advance 1 for what I feel is a good example of mixing the GB sound hardware with the PCM channels.
Sonic Retro
Posted: 2/11/2006 7:35 AM
(Edited: 2/14/2006 1:00 AM)
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nitsuja
Emulator Coder, Skilled player (1310)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
Computer TASer of 2011 TAS of 2011 First edition TAS of 2011 Computer TAS of 2011 Sega TAS of 2010 Sega TAS of 2008 Sega TAS of 2007 Glitchy TAS of 2007
I knew it also had the same sound hardware as the GB, but I thought that was only used for backward compatibility with GB games, not for actual GBA music. (Is this why the instruments in FFTA have such a weird quality to them? EDIT: Yes, it definitely is the reason. I tried turning off the GB sound channels in VBA and some of the instruments in FFTA disappeared. I think the music actually sounds better without them.)
Posted: 2/11/2006 7:51 AM
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CtrlAltDestroy
Active player (328)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
If you mute the first four sound channels (the GB channels) while playing a GBA game, you'll find that you lose a lot of the SFX during gameplay. However, I can't recall a time when this has ever effected music.
Posted: 2/14/2006 1:09 AM
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gamedirector
Joined: 3/19/2005
Posts: 63
Location: SuPeRZzT LaNd
the difference is that they didn't bother to make the sound any good, so developers had to get creative in programming it to make it fit.. for the most part all the gba music sucks, or sounds too chippy, aside from a few examples like FFTA, Castlevania Harmony of Dissonance, and Jazz Jackrabbit (maybe some others too), a gaming system created many years before in the stone age had better sound. Nintendo DS has fixed the problem in bad music, but still has limits. Sonic Rush is a good example of great sound.
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Posted: 4/15/2006 2:35 AM
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Jyzero
Joined: 4/26/2004
Posts: 213
Location: Montréal, Québec
The SNES had a dedicated coprocessor for sound, 64kB of RAM for osund and a DSP for mixing 8 stereo (16 bit?) channels at 32kHz with features like sample compression, enveloppe, echo, interpolation. The GBA only has GB sound + 2 PCM channels with DMA. This mean : -All the music/sound logic must be done by CPU -Samples share the RAM with the game -All mixing to feed the PCM channels must be done by CPU, usually at lower sampling rate to leave more processing power to game logic and graphics.