The Sound Capabilities of the SNES

Just a quick look at what sounds the SNES can make!

shoutout to Retro Game Mechanics Explained!

----

songs used:
0:01 Tournament Stage (Ohmono Black Bass Fishing)
1:05 Rulue Area 4 (Super Nazo Puyo)
2:08 Main Theme (RPM Racing)
2:59 Level 01 (The Terminator)
3:57 Main Menu (Tekichuu Keiba Juku)
4:11 Main Menu (Tekichuu Keiba Juku) (but fixed)
5:23 Ending ~ Staff Roll (Do-Re-Mi Fantasy)

----

GST♥ can be found at...

Please consider supporting this channel on Patreon!

[tyisafk]

The wind without the effects sound like a dental appointment lol

[demgreens]

That pitch modulation example reminds reminds me of when I played FFVI on SNES9x around 1999. The wind sounded exactly like your demonstration of disabled pitch modulation.

[jasonblalock]

Hey, I absolutely LOVE that little countdown timer you use to tell people when a piece of onscreen text will be going away. I genuinely wish more YouTubers would include something like it.

[DeLaFiremountain]

6:30 wow, I recognized that grating, high-pitched tone just as quickly as the wind itself! were early SNES emulators generally unable to do the pitch mod effect? That's the only reason I can think of that I would find that sound so familiar.

[Nikku]

I WAS WAITING FOR THIS~!!


The inverse-audio thing is basically what allows surround-sound support in certain SNES games, as Dolby Surround back then took both channels and any waveforms that were literally inverse in one channel that is right-side up on another were instead put into the back speaker, while everything else was on the forward speakers.

[jethinabox]

great video, as an SPC maker it was fun seeing it explained in a friendly way (as opposed to the 'readme's ive seen for drivers haha)

[Memelord]

This is just making me think how much better and more space there as as an 8bit composer who has to deal with DPCM samples, amazing

[JoeyHahn]

I'm working on SNES programming right now, and the sound stuff was very hard to figure out (I knew the basics for a while, but the specifics on programming are a mess).
I wasn't expecting this video to go much actually in depth, but you exceeded my expectations pretty quickly. Great work!

[andrewchoi]

The audio editing in this vid was pure bliss. Thx for the great content💪🔥🔥

[maikerunezumi]

6:29
Funny enough, when I played Chrono Trigger for the first time, it was the port on Final Fantasy Chronicles for the PlayStation.
Any scene that had the wind sound effect playing pretty much sounded exactly like that.

[rudeboyspodcast]

Another incredibly high quality video!

Also @ 5:39 I see my boy Teckworks has good taste as always :)

[egmusic]

Also, side note about the 8 channel limitation:

Although the snes could indeed have 8 stereo channels of sound, many games reserved anywhere from 1-3 channels for sfx. Typically these are channels 6-8, which is the format Super metroid uses, as playing a sample in channel 6 will play over a SFX that would be assigned to that channel

[Alianger]

Interesting video, and shoutouts to retro game audio who have also talked about how it works in detail.

The SNES Port of Prince Of Persia uses pitch modulation across the entire soundtrack, as well as vibrato.

[djmhyde]

3:41 actually you can use this trick to create surround sound if you have the correct equipment to play it
this example you give, in a surround sound equipment plays only in the rear channel

some SNES games have sound made in surround, and some of them are very well made, like Secret of Mana 2

[jaysistar]

5:45 the SCSP (Yamaha YMF-292) in the Saturn (and its DreamCast variant, which may be different) has 32 operators that (with limitations) can modulate each other. Each operator is either put in sine wave or PCM mode.

[handsome]

The part about the inverse sound blew my mind. My phone is mono so I heard nothing, then switched to my tablet and bam, literally sounded like it was inside my head.

[EngineerDJ_Julius]

My favorite old school music is 16-BIT music.

It has nostalgic sounding audio, and at the same time is advanced enough to fit into any genre

[ZTenski]

3:41 that's trippy, I thought you were joking but it made me feel like I needed to pop my ears.

[egmusic]

I see at 2:30 you are showing the C700 VST, it's a great tool for DAWs and gives a lot of info, but it's usually better for display purposes since most spc music can be written or decided to .It format