Was Amiga's sound capabilities similat to the NES's?

[Burge]

I've been listening to a few mods lately and they sound strikingly similar to NES ditties I remember from a long time ago. Anybody know if they have similar sound chips or whatever?

[RCK]

It may be similar for all the chip-tunes.
But you can not compare a NES sound quality to an Amiga !
The NES can't produce digital sound for example, all the tune are based on a chipset which produce pre-recorded sound (a bit like midi sound). I never heard digits on NES, but maybe I'm wrong.

All the Amiga modules are used to be done with 4 digital channels, who are playing samples.

[Amiga1992]

No, there are DAC chips in certain NES cartridges (the famous SCC-1 from Konami, which appears in games like Gradius).

However Amiga and NES sound chips work differently. The NES chip does not take prerecorded sound, that would be a wavetable synthesis method. the NES uses a PSG (Pulse Sound Generator), it has a couple of waveforms and generates the sounds in real time, thanks to many parameters. The C64's SID chip works teh same, but it's not a PSG chip., it's a bit more complex, a mix of digital synthesizer with analogue resonant filters.

MIDI is just a language for musical machines to communicate What you hear in PCs is either FM synthesis (old SB cards, the OPL3 chip), and nowadays, they all use wavetable synthesis (of course, these cards also have DACs for samples)

The Amiga uses a DAC which can play digital samples. It does not generate sounds in thsoe tunes you heard, you are listening to really small samples that emulate what a NES or SID chip can do. There were a few trackers that generated its own sounds, SID-chip style (the famous synth sounds, even Octamed included them after a few years). I am not sure how Paula works, so I don't know if these synth sounds generated in real time are being created by Paula or the 68000 chip.

Hope that helps

[Fred the Fop]

Originally posted by Burge
I've been listening to a few mods lately and they sound strikingly similar to NES ditties I remember from a long time ago. Anybody know if they have similar sound chips or whatever?

No it wasn't you dork.

[kriz]

what about these 4k demos, with sound ??? the sound have to be programmed, or do they use tiny samples there too ???

(good examples 4k intro from exploder(!!!) or ephedrina)

[FromWithin]

The Amiga has got four 8-bit sample playback channels. To get noise out of it, you point each channel to a bit of RAM, tell it how big it is and that's what it plays. If it's a big long sample, it will play a big long sample. If it's a tiny 64-byte piece of data, it will loop it, making it sound like a continuous tone. "chip" tunes are just little looping blocks of data. For the 4k demos, it would be more efficient to write a tiny piece of code that would generate a waveform mathematically in RAM.

[kriz]

mm yeah, what i thought ....


check out those 4k from exploder if you want something great !!! (the 64k intros are also very good, from extreme Russia)

[FromWithin]

The SNES sound chip was created by Sony and is 90% the same as the sound chip in the Playstation and PS2. It had 64k and played back ADPCM compressed sound using 8 channels. The compression effectively gave you three times more RAM, but meant that if you used looping sounds, you had to set the loop points on multiples of 16. The Playstation has 512k with 24 channels (and loop points on bizarre multiples of 28). PS2 has 2Mb and is basically just two PS1 sound chips. <sarcasm>Hurray for Sony's audio hardware department</sarcasm>.

The Mega-CD was insane. The audio hardware could playback sound at MHz speed, and yet there was only 64k RAM. It didn't have hardware compression. We had a Protracker player and I just did all the music in four channels in Protracker.