Super Mario Songs Restored From Gigaleak

The songs were synthesized on the system in real time. What they found were the uncompressed midi sounds fonts which were used to make the bgm, and then they recorded songs using those with their own synthesizer.

Edit: s/sound/font/g
Forgot what they were called. lol
 
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Krenum said:
Good stuff!

I love music from that era. SNES had some greatest chip tunes of all time.
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The SPC700 in the SNES really isn't "chiptune" music, it has more in common with tracker synthesis. It's a 16 bit 8 channel ADPCM sample based sound system in a module that's completely independent of the SNES itself. It doesn't even need the SNES to work, you can remove it from the console and use something like an Arduino to play music on it.

Chiptune music is more like the Sega Genesis, NES or Game Boy where you have to write your own sound driver to bang away on a FM or PSG chip and the skill of the programmer influences how good the tunes can be.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
The SPC700 in the SNES really isn't "chiptune" music, it has more in common with tracker synthesis. It's a 16 bit 8 channel ADPCM sample based sound system in a module that's completely independent of the SNES itself. It doesn't even need the SNES to work, you can remove it from the console and use something like an Arduino to play music on it.

Chiptune music is more like the Sega Genesis, NES or Game Boy where you have to write your own sound driver to bang away on a FM or PSG chip and the skill of the programmer influences how good the tunes can be.
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Fine, I'll edit my original post. I can always count on someone to correct me around here these days. You forgot to mention the Turbografx 16, now that had some amazing chip tunes on it.

"The SNES had some great music".
 
I have an off-topic question. If wanting to create music today using the same sounds of old games (like are heard in SNES, Genesis, Apogee and Epic Megagames titles), what is the best way to do that, without actually needing those old synths / sound modules? And are there means to emulate those sound chips / audio processors in software?
 
I'd love to hear Cele's opera without any compression.
I wonder how that'd be.
 
Delicieuxz said:
I have an off-topic question. If wanting to create music today using the same sounds of old games (like are heard in SNES, Genesis, Apogee and Epic Megagames titles), what is the best way to do that, without actually needing those old synths / sound modules? And are there means to emulate those sound chips / audio processors in software?
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Mario Paint
/sarcasm

You'll need a midi/synth or software to emulate one, a midi font, and some music that you want to play (sheet music, etc.). A midi keyboard would be helpful but not really necessary.

Edit: there are some really cool videos on yt showing how music was made on those systems, and how to make music using the dev kits for those systems, which I would recommend even if you don't end up doing it that way.
 
Nobu said:
Mario Paint
/sarcasm

You'll need a midi/synth or software to emulate one, a midi font, and some music that you want to play (sheet music, etc.). A midi keyboard would be helpful but not really necessary.

Edit: there are some really cool videos on yt showing how music was made on those systems, and how to make music using the dev kits for those systems, which I would recommend even if you don't end up doing it that way.
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Cool, thanks. I've grabbed a bunch of sound / MIDI fonts now: One for the Roland SC-55, SC-88 Pro, NTONYX's, Arachno's, SGM-V2.01 (which I think sounds pretty good). And I found this large font for the Roland MT-32: https://www.hedsound.com/2019/06/mt32-cm64l-sf2-for-everyone.html

I've also discovered Roland Sound Canvas VA, which is an official Roland plugin that contains the sounds of the SC-8820, SC-88 Pro, SC-88, and SC-55.


How does old DOS game music go from being made with a particular synth device to having 8+ differently-sounding variants depending on whether a person selects as their audio device General MIDI, Gravis Ultrasound, Adlib, SoundBlaster, SB Pro, SB 16, Awe 32, etc? If a person wanted to make music using the sounds of the rendering of a particular one of those devices, is there a way to get that?

Do you know any I should aim to get, if I want to have the sound fonts for all the different music-rendering options (General MIDI, SoundBlaster, SB Pro, SB 16, Awe 32) for Zone66, Raptor, Hocus Pocus, One Must Fall 2077, Tyrian, Terminal Velocity, Acid Tetris (which might be default sounds in a tracker they used, which I've already downloaded), Apocalypse Abyss, Skyroads, Halloween Harry, Monster Bash, Wacky Wheels, Test Drive III, Monkey Island, DOOM? I also want to have PC speaker sounds like are used in Ski or Die.
 
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Delicieuxz said:
Cool, thanks. I've grabbed a bunch of sound / MIDI fonts now: One for the Roland SC-55, SC-88 Pro, NTONYX's, Arachno's, SGM-V2.01 (which I think sounds pretty good). And I found this large font for the Roland MT-32: https://www.hedsound.com/2019/06/mt32-cm64l-sf2-for-everyone.html

I've also discovered Roland Sound Canvas VA, which is an official Roland plugin that contains the sounds of the SC-8820, SC-88 Pro, SC-88, and SC-55.


How does old DOS game music go from being made with a particular synth device to having 8+ differently-sounding variants depending on whether a person selects as their audio device General MIDI, SoundBlaster, SB Pro, SB 16, Awe 32, etc?

Do you know any I should aim to get, if I want to have the sound fonts for all the different music-rendering options (General MIDI, SoundBlaster, SB Pro, SB 16, Awe 32) for Zone66, Raptor, Hocus Pocus, One Must Fall 2077, Tyrian, Terminal Velocity, Acid Tetris (which might be default sounds in a tracker they used, which I've already downloaded), Apocalypse Abyss, Skyroads, Halloween Harry, Monster Bash, Wacky Wheels, Test Drive III, DOOM? I also want to have PC speaker sounds like are used in Ski or Die.
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Might be better off asking in the audio forum. Afa sb, sb16, etc, those are just software emulators of old sound cards. They handled audio differently, and so they had slightly different sounding output. They all had the same (or vary nearly same) input sounds. Some were lower fidelity, or had fewer channels, so some inputs might have been truncated, down-mixed, or omitted on on some games.
 
Delicieuxz said:
Cool, thanks. I've grabbed a bunch of sound / MIDI fonts now: One for the Roland SC-55, SC-88 Pro, NTONYX's, Arachno's, SGM-V2.01 (which I think sounds pretty good). And I found this large font for the Roland MT-32: https://www.hedsound.com/2019/06/mt32-cm64l-sf2-for-everyone.html

I've also discovered Roland Sound Canvas VA, which is an official Roland plugin that contains the sounds of the SC-8820, SC-88 Pro, SC-88, and SC-55.


How does old DOS game music go from being made with a particular synth device to having 8+ differently-sounding variants depending on whether a person selects as their audio device General MIDI, SoundBlaster, SB Pro, SB 16, Awe 32, etc?

Do you know any I should aim to get, if I want to have the sound fonts for all the different music-rendering options (General MIDI, SoundBlaster, SB Pro, SB 16, Awe 32) for Zone66, Raptor, Hocus Pocus, One Must Fall 2077, Tyrian, Terminal Velocity, Acid Tetris (which might be default sounds in a tracker they used, which I've already downloaded), Apocalypse Abyss, Skyroads, Halloween Harry, Monster Bash, Wacky Wheels, Test Drive III, DOOM? I also want to have PC speaker sounds like are used in Ski or Die.
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They either made card specific tracks or, worse, used a mapping wedge.

Watch for an overview. LGR covers MIDI stuff from the DOS days as well.
 
Nobu said:
Roland was the best, btw. :p
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First edition MT-32 was, crashes and all. The rest... eh.. ;)
There are examples of the MT-32 being worse in games where it was composed with the OPL3 default sustain in mind. In the GM wavetable days I can remember having to switch some games back to the SB16 for music.
 
Todd Walter said:
First edition MT-32 was, crashes and all. The rest... eh.. ;)
There are examples of the MT-32 being worse in games where it was composed with the OPL3 default sustain in mind. In the GM wavetable days I can remember having to switch some games back to the SB16 for music.
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Never had the device, but even emulated on crappy onboard audio it sounded fantastic compared to the others. SB16 and...the one with gold in the name? They were close second, and sometimes better depending on the game.
 
Wow, that's pretty awesome! I would have thought they were created much closer to how the SNES's sound chip made it sound. I would have assumed this was just a different rendition altogether had I not known it was from a source leak.

Now I have to wonder what other SNES original music sounded like; specifically from Super Mario RPG, as it had the best sound track of any SNES game IMO. But I'd also love to hear the source from SM64 as well.
 
Nobu said:
Never had the device, but even emulated on crappy onboard audio it sounded fantastic compared to the others. SB16 and...the one with gold in the name? They were close second, and sometimes better depending on the game.
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Adlib Gold, probably. Pretty sure they all used the Yamaha OPL3 variants but had different PCM capabilities that had to be accounted for in software. SB16 had a wavetable daughter card available but it's CD audio passthru became the defacto standard for background music since it saved the hassle of mastering the sound track for each device and didn't need the CPU.
 
T4rd said:
Wow, that's pretty awesome! I would have thought they were created much closer to how the SNES's sound chip made it sound. I would have assumed this was just a different rendition altogether had I not known it was from a source leak.

Now I have to wonder what other SNES original music sounded like; specifically from Super Mario RPG, as it had the best sound track of any SNES game IMO. But I'd also love to hear the source from SM64 as well.
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I think those aren't all the original sounds. Some sound way too different to me. Maybe they were guessing at some of the sounds, or maybe not all of them were available to use.

Maybe I'm wrong, though.

For example, the opening of this track:




Doesn't begin to sound like the same instrument used in the in-game track:




Another example:



 
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Delicieuxz said:
I think those aren't all the original sounds. Some sound way too different to me. Maybe they were guessing at some of the sounds, or maybe not all of them were available to use.

Maybe I'm wrong, though.

For example, the opening of this track:




Doesn't begin to sound like the same instrument used in the in-game track:




Another example:



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The gigaleak uncovered the original midi fonts. they will sound different (sometmes drastically different) depending upon which synthesizer and/or hardware you feed them into.

Both videos are producing sounds from the same midi fonts. They sound very different, due to the way each synthesizer and hardware translates those fonts into sound.

No doubt, there was some final tweaking and mixing for the actual game. But the base sounds themselves, come from how the hardware translates the fonts. And at least part of the difference, is that the SNES's sound chip is 16 bit, among other limitations.
 
Nobu said:
Never had the device, but even emulated on crappy onboard audio it sounded fantastic compared to the others. SB16 and...the one with gold in the name? They were close second, and sometimes better depending on the game.
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Here's a good comparison on different sound cards with Doom:




That's the one thing about MIDI. They ranged from awful to great. FM Synthesis on the other hand tended to be consistent.
 
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