8-bit and 16-bit style sounds

[tetsuneko]

There are also tons of bit reducers that can be used to make normal (44.1/16 +) samples sound chippier.

Sounds to me like you know quite a bit about this. Could you recommend some reducers? Exceptionally flexible reducer plugins would be a killer addition to my systems! So far the best I have is SampleReducer, an old plug from TbT. It only does downsampling < 44kHz, but the different filtermodes make it quite usable.

[mistertoast]

16-bit style sounds

You do realize that "16-bit style sounds" can include those of a quality beyond the range of human perception? A CD of the London Philharmonic playing a well-rendered Beethoven Symphony can be "16-bit style".

He's not talking about sample bitdepth. He's talking about the sounds made by console machines/computers/arcade machines that had 8-bit and 16-bit processors. The sound was usually created by a dedicated sound chip. You know, sid chip, yamaha sound chips, NES and Atari sounds, etc.

[james0tucson]

16-bit style sounds

You do realize that "16-bit style sounds" can include those of a quality beyond the range of human perception? A CD of the London Philharmonic playing a well-rendered Beethoven Symphony can be "16-bit style".

He's not talking about sample bitdepth. He's talking about the sounds made by console machines/computers/arcade machines that had 8-bit and 16-bit processors. The sound was usually created by a dedicated sound chip. You know, sid chip, yamaha sound chips, NES and Atari sounds, etc.

Ah, right, of course. Part of the overall sound may be due to the nature of the amps and speakers in TV sets of the same vintage; maybe something to consider in the quest for duplicating the experience.

[Mr. Tunes]

Ah, right, of course. Part of the overall sound may be due to the nature of the amps and speakers in TV sets of the same vintage; maybe something to consider in the quest for duplicating the experience.

good point - most people forget that. i remember if i ever used the headphone jack on the Genesis the thing sounded WAY different

[tetsuneko]

So, in order to re-create a console sound, you could for example:

- Apply the sound gen (Magical8bit has nice aliased osc's!)
- Apply resampling with a suitable flavor
- Apply "jitter"-effect (I think i remember a plug that did something like this.. Were those console sound generators all digital? Obviously if they didn't have DAC's you woudln't have to simulate their "weak" quality)
- Apply a shaping (some kind of preamp/IR thingy to smear it a little and give a hint of non-linearity)
- Apply a noise floor (pluggotic hisshum etc)

Some or all of those should give quite convincing results, at least in theory (?) Oh yeah, you might want to add a little high frequency whine somewhere close to TV frequencies (10kHz > ?) to give it that "final touch".

[93143]

If you want Mega Man, as mentioned in the original post, you're talking about the NES and SNES. The above technique could be good for the NES (in particular, it had a very characteristic aliased triangle wave). In addition, if you're going to go as far as adding TV whine, you should probably have a fairly brutal filter to emulate the effects of running it through a TV speaker.

The SNES needs different treatment. It was probably the most advanced of the popular pre-Playstation consoles sound-wise. It had a dedicated wavetable module with effects (the SPC700), which was capable in principle of some advanced synthesis techniques. It ran at 32 kHz. It also had very low aliasing due to the use of 4-point Gaussian interpolation.

If you want to know what the SNES is capable of music-wise, download SPC dumps for Vortex, Rock 'n' Roll Racing, Super Mario RPG, Dragon Quest 3, and maybe Super R-Type for good measure, and listen to them with the Alpha-II Winamp plugin. Vortex is best listened to in Dolby Surround...

[mistertoast]

One of my favorite chip sounds was the big phasy deep sound from Defender. Made the cabinet rumble.

[botkiller]

does anyone else have an issue with the YMCK plugin in Ableton wherein it does nothing but produce noise (really ugly, ugly noise) in the right channel? The left is fine... they of course don't support the VST at their webpage...

[vanheusen]

Yes! I have. Have not found a solution yet...

[vanheusen]

Nevermind.. I tried Quadrasid and that was actually more what I wanted. Ymck is a cool band though, hehe.

[Pantsdown666]

Check this page :
http://www.mmonoplayer.com/mspexternals.php
Most of these require MAX/MSP, though if you go down the page there's a few VSTs of the NES etc - these should run under (free) Pluggo Runtime that you can get from here :
http://www.cycling74.com/downloads/pluggo

[botkiller]

i've made an 8bit song, I've got it up at my myspace... http://www.myspace.com/brianbotkiller - it's called "it's computer time", so lemme know what you think if you listen.

[fanfarecircuit]

Check this page :
http://www.mmonoplayer.com/mspexternals.php
Most of these require MAX/MSP, though if you go down the page there's a few VSTs of the NES etc - these should run under (free) Pluggo Runtime that you can get from here :
http://www.cycling74.com/downloads/pluggo

nice link, man!

thanks

[MaliceX]

http://www.ymck.net/english/download/index.html

This sounds very much like a NES. The triangle wave has that buzzing sound.