Game Sound, the 7800, is it really a big deal?

[toptenmaterial]

ok, so I played galaga today on the ProSystem emulator (and got my ass handed to me by the way). all of the sounds are awesome, including the music!

[ATARI7800fan]

I just hear the theme song for the Atari 2600 version of thrust+ and must say I was surprised by good it sounded for just being a two channel chip, and yes bad music does bother me, some games it sets the tone and mood. Rpg's for instance.

[kool kitty89]

ok, so I played galaga today on the ProSystem emulator (and got my ass handed to me by the way). all of the sounds are awesome, including the music!

Yeah, that's a pretty good conversion, lower res and more cut down graphics than the NES in some ways, but more animation and smooth sprite movement (NES is smooth when attaching/maneuvering but not when in formation for whatever reason -at one point I thought maybe they were using BG tiles for the formation, but then I noticed a bit of flicker, it's a bit odd that they don't have more arcade like movement), the sound is pretty decent for the 7800 version but very TIA sounding (so it's a matter of taste -I rather like it, but it's not much like the arcade at all) while the NES doesn't sound a lot like the arcade either but is a fair bit closer.

 

Both are pretty good conversions though, but it seems like the 7800 game might play better (depending on the controller used) but I haven't played them on real hardware so I'm not sure. (really weird that the NES has the choppiness issue though)

[toptenmaterial]

the 7800 version has different flight patterns, I noticed...

[kool kitty89]

On the specific issue of sound again, I think the 7800 version of Joust sounds significantly better and more like the arcade than the A8/5200 version. (I doubt it's due to TIA's capabilities, but probably more do to better optimization/care taken to simulate the arcade sounds as best as possible -and the fact that all the early 80s williams games had just 1 sound channel so FX could be optimized as such)

[Underball]

On the specific issue of sound again, I think the 7800 version of Joust sounds significantly better and more like the arcade than the A8/5200 version. (I doubt it's due to TIA's capabilities, but probably more do to better optimization/care taken to simulate the arcade sounds as best as possible -and the fact that all the early 80s williams games had just 1 sound channel so FX could be optimized as such)

Most people consider the 7800 version of Joust to be the best home version ever. Some even say it plays better than the Arcade version. I tend to agree. Teh vertical monitor on the arcade version leaves very little room for error.

[DracIsBack]

Both Fatal Run and Midnight Mutants had the same developer, Sculptured Software.

 

Midnight Mutants was actually done by RADIOACTIVE SOFTWARE.

 

If there was ever a 7800 game that I wanted a sequel on, that was it!

[toptenmaterial]

I played the 2600 and 7800 versions of desert falcon today (on emulators). The 7800 is obviously visually superior, but the music is exactly the same. Same sound chip?

[ApolloBoy]

The 7800 is obviously visually superior, but the music is exactly the same. Same sound chip?

Yes.

[kool kitty89]

On the specific issue of sound again, I think the 7800 version of Joust sounds significantly better and more like the arcade than the A8/5200 version. (I doubt it's due to TIA's capabilities, but probably more do to better optimization/care taken to simulate the arcade sounds as best as possible -and the fact that all the early 80s williams games had just 1 sound channel so FX could be optimized as such)

Most people consider the 7800 version of Joust to be the best home version ever. Some even say it plays better than the Arcade version. I tend to agree. Teh vertical monitor on the arcade version leaves very little room for error.

Vertical? The game was horizontal AFIK...

http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=598 Only a handful of Williams 6809 boards used the vertical layout. (Sinistar being among them)

 

I definitely agree that it was the best version at the time, and probably the best version up to 1995, but I think the Williams Arcade Hits version (Genesis, SNES, Playstation, Saturn), or Midway Hits on N64 is preferable. Not only pretty much arcade perfect (resolution might be slightly off, not sure what they 6809 boards used, the home ports mostly used 256x224 -SNES and Genesis for sure), but an extremely flexible difficulty settings menu giving you control over lives at start (1 to 99), points needed for bonus (or no bonus at all), level of difficulty of the enemies, etc.

 

And of course, you get defender, defender 2, Robotron 2084 (Genesis version would allow 2600/7800 sticks, or genesis arcade sticks), and Sinistar, all with similar arcade quality and flexible options. (sinistar moving the status bar to the right column in order to better match a horizontal layout)

The N64 compilation (and some later midway compilations) added Tapper and Spy Hunter in addition to the above with the exception of Defender II. (the Dreamcast and GBA versions also differ)

 

 

 

 

I like the 7800 version, but personally have more fun with the SNES version. (probably would be the same for N64, Genesis, Saturn, etc -PSX only with a decent 3rd party controller- )

[peedenmark7]

love to play Xevious , but the sounds irritate me. midnight mutants is a close second.

someone just gave me california games and I dont know if the music is supposed to be the original or a run-dmc rip..

 

I find it weird that in many cases atari had the ability to do the arcade sounds verbatim, but chose not too.

 

what's not to love about woka- woka -woka ?

[toptenmaterial]

.

Edited January 20, 2011 by toptenmaterial

[toptenmaterial]

love to play Xevious , but the sounds irritate me. midnight mutants is a close second.

someone just gave me california games and I dont know if the music is supposed to be the original or a run-dmc rip..

 

I find it weird that in many cases atari had the ability to do the arcade sounds verbatim, but chose not too.

 

what's not to love about woka- woka -woka ?

 

You are right, there is a lot of incongruety with sound. Just look at Donkey Kong Jr vs Galaga. That is a point that has often been made with atari graphics (more with the 2600). But since the 2600 and 7800 have such similer sound chips (the same maybe?) there is a lot of inconsistancy. Why didn't it sound good every time? I don't know if the programmers resorted to tricks with the 7800 sound, like they often did with 2600 graphics.

 

And you are right about "what's not to love about woka- woka- woka-, but keep in mind that those woka woka woka's came from a big ol' arcade machine and not our beloved ProSystem

[Atarifever]

love to play Xevious , but the sounds irritate me.

I'm playing that game a lot for the high score club. The soundtrack I'm using for it is Kris Kristofferson "The Silver Tounged Devil and I" on vinyl. For DK Jr. I think I played to Gordon Lightfoots self titled first album (also on vinyl of course).

[kool kitty89]

love to play Xevious , but the sounds irritate me. midnight mutants is a close second.

someone just gave me california games and I dont know if the music is supposed to be the original or a run-dmc rip..

 

I find it weird that in many cases atari had the ability to do the arcade sounds verbatim, but chose not too.

 

what's not to love about woka- woka -woka ?

 

You are right, there is a lot of incongruety with sound. Just look at Donkey Kong Jr vs Galaga. That is a point that has often been made with atari graphics (more with the 2600). But since the 2600 and 7800 have such similer sound chips (the same maybe?) there is a lot of inconsistancy. Why didn't it sound good every time? I don't know if the programmers resorted to tricks with the 7800 sound, like they often did with 2600 graphics.

 

And you are right about "what's not to love about woka- woka- woka-, but keep in mind that those woka woka woka's came from a big ol' arcade machine and not our beloved ProSystem

TIA is the sound/video chip in the VCS (also reads the fire buttons and paddles), it's also the only source of audio in the 7800 (to save cost and board space -probably a back move to to cram POKEY in there though, at least in hindsight -even if it meant a riserboard)

 

The 7800 should have been able to do some better hacks than the VCS due to added CPU time and use of interrupts (possibly use RIOT's timer to drive PWM sounds or 4-bit PCM sample playback depending how much CPU time you were willing to use), but still jsut the 2 TIA channels to work with... and using TIA's hardware sound generation alone you've got some nice sound effect generation but way too low frequency (pitch) resolution for most music (hence why TIA music often sounds off key or excessively simplified to avoid off key notes). That is something that CPU/interrupt driven modulation would largely bypass though, allowing a pretty reasonable frequency range, at least up to TIA's max hardware frequency. (there's no true direct DAC mode like POKEY, so you'd have to hack it by modulating volume for the square wave mode set to max frequency -same for both PWM and PCM stuff)

 

No games seemed to do that though, not sure of any homebrew/demo stuff either. I wonder if RIOT's IRQ line is actually attached to the 6502 in the 7800... if that was left off it would remove such interrupt/timer driven tricks. (and would have been a rather bad oversight given how cheap/simple connecting that line would be, even if it was a motherboard flaw they could have patched it for early runs -Sega made that very mistake by leaving the YM2612's interrupt line disconnected -much worse given the apparent majority of weaker Z80 programmers pushing sloppy software sample playback on the Genesis)

Edited January 21, 2011 by kool kitty89

[toptenmaterial]

hey koolkitty, is Z80 a processor? the same processor used in the original game boy and a lot if other stuff? you seem to have an excellent understanding of the technical end, thanks.

[kenfused]

I wonder if RIOT's IRQ line is actually attached to the 6502 in the 7800... if that was left off it would remove such interrupt/timer driven tricks. (and would have been a rather bad oversight given how cheap/simple connecting that line would be, even if it was a motherboard flaw they could have patched it for early runs -Sega made that very mistake by leaving the YM2612's interrupt line disconnected -much worse given the apparent majority of weaker Z80 programmers pushing sloppy software sample playback on the Genesis)

 

I always assumed it wasn't connected. I would think that could somehow break 2600 compatibility? Couldn't an unexpected IRQ fire in 2600 mode which may not even have the IRQ vector set?

[gdement]

I wonder if RIOT's IRQ line is actually attached to the 6502 in the 7800... if that was left off it would remove such interrupt/timer driven tricks. (and would have been a rather bad oversight given how cheap/simple connecting that line would be, even if it was a motherboard flaw they could have patched it for early runs -Sega made that very mistake by leaving the YM2612's interrupt line disconnected -much worse given the apparent majority of weaker Z80 programmers pushing sloppy software sample playback on the Genesis)

 

I always assumed it wasn't connected. I would think that could somehow break 2600 compatibility? Couldn't an unexpected IRQ fire in 2600 mode which may not even have the IRQ vector set?

 

That's also my understanding, though I never tried it myself, just going by what I remember you and Bruce Tomlin talking about back a few years ago. Until now I didn't understand why it wouldn't be connected, but what you say about 2600 mode makes sense.

Too bad they didn't put the Maria in control of the connection depending on game mode. I guess that's just another bit of added complexity they didn't think worthwhile. But however it be accomplished, a working interrupt timer in 7800 mode would have been useful.

[Atari_Falcon]

I think lack of a special sound hardware was one of the biggest drawbacks of this system. But there are still some games with ingame music without pokey that I really like:

 

- Midnight Mutants

- Alien Brigade

- Ikari Warriors

- Double Dragon

- Fatal Run

 

And from the "European" point of view, I meant without the 5200 between them it is a step forward from the 2600. But not the step one expected between 1978/79 and 1987!

[GroovyBee]

TIA is the sound/video chip in the VCS (also reads the fire buttons and paddles), it's also the only source of audio in the 7800 (to save cost and board space -probably a back move to to cram POKEY in there though, at least in hindsight -even if it meant a riserboard)

 

TIA can also be made to playback samples, Jinks comes to mind as an example. You set TIA up to run in volume modulation mode. If you use WSYNC you'll have 15KHz playback rate. The difficulty comes during VBLANK time when you still need to be playing the sample. The easiest method to play a sample is to turn off the screen DMA and sit in a timed loop.

 

(there's no true direct DAC mode like POKEY, so you'd have to hack it by modulating volume for the square wave mode set to max frequency -same for both PWM and PCM stuff)

 

POKEY doesn't have a direct DAC mode it has a volume modulation mode.

 

No games seemed to do that though, not sure of any homebrew/demo stuff either. I wonder if RIOT's IRQ line is actually attached to the 6502 in the 7800...

 

The RIOT IRQ line is not connected to the CPU on the 7800.

[kool kitty89]

hey koolkitty, is Z80 a processor? the same processor used in the original game boy and a lot if other stuff? you seem to have an excellent understanding of the technical end, thanks.

Huh? Z80 in what? The 2600, A8 computers, 5200, 7800 (and Lynx for that matter) all used 6502 CPUs... (Colecovision, Master System, MSX, ZX Spectrum, Astrocade, and many many others used the Z80 -the 6502 and Z80 were the 2 dominant 8-bit microprocessor architectures from the late 80s onward and common in many game systems, home computers, and arcade boards) the GB didn't use a pure Z80 either, it used sort of a hybrid Z80/8080 to make all bus accesses 4 cycles long (to facilitate shared memory accesses), they could have used a normal Z80 and an external wait state mechanism, but I assume the integrated method was cheaper.

 

 

 

I wonder if RIOT's IRQ line is actually attached to the 6502 in the 7800... if that was left off it would remove such interrupt/timer driven tricks. (and would have been a rather bad oversight given how cheap/simple connecting that line would be, even if it was a motherboard flaw they could have patched it for early runs -Sega made that very mistake by leaving the YM2612's interrupt line disconnected -much worse given the apparent majority of weaker Z80 programmers pushing sloppy software sample playback on the Genesis)

 

I always assumed it wasn't connected. I would think that could somehow break 2600 compatibility? Couldn't an unexpected IRQ fire in 2600 mode which may not even have the IRQ vector set?

 

That's also my understanding, though I never tried it myself, just going by what I remember you and Bruce Tomlin talking about back a few years ago. Until now I didn't understand why it wouldn't be connected, but what you say about 2600 mode makes sense.

Too bad they didn't put the Maria in control of the connection depending on game mode. I guess that's just another bit of added complexity they didn't think worthwhile. But however it be accomplished, a working interrupt timer in 7800 mode would have been useful.

 

Hmm, it's a real shame they didn't configure the 7800 to have a more comprehensive division of 2600 and 7800 modes... like a formal toggle/switch of several lines/signals for booting to 7800 mode or locking it down for 2600 mode. That would also have improved composite video quality as came up in another recent thread. (formally toggling to TIA or MARIA video only rather than mixing for weaker quality video for both)

Another tweak for 7800 mode might have been allowing RIOT and TIA to both clock up to 1.79 MHz (so using a 2 MHz rated RIOT and making sure all TIA/compatible ICs used in the 7800 were stable at 1.79 MHz) to avoid the 1.19 MHz speed drop for accessing RIOT/TIA in 7800 mode. (so toggling the system clock for CPU+RIOT+TIA depending on whether 7800 or 2600 mode was booted and then locking it in as such) Not only reducing CPU time penalty for I/O and sound accesses (and making RIOT's scratchpad potentially more useful), but also keeping a constant clock speed and thus making cycle timed coding easier.

 

Even if they did have POKEY inside the 7800 (with full functionality with interrupts -which is ruined by the limited cart interface), the RIOT timer would still be useful for doing modulations (or PCM) on TIA while leaving all 4 POKEY channels free to do whatever. (and TIA modulation stuff should sound close to that of POKEY while plain TIA chip sounds are much more limited in frequency resolution... actually RIOT's timer should actually allow higher resolution frequency steps than the 8-bit range POKEY channels allow unpaired )

 

POKEY doesn't have a direct DAC mode it has a volume modulation mode.

Right... direct DAC wouldn't make sense as such (it would make the timers useless for PCM too as you wouldn't have the square wave crossing zero). Plus direct DAC would also allow more than 4-bit resolution... or that would depend on the internal design of POKEY. (not sure if it mixes in hardware to a single 8-bit DAC or using 4 separate hardware DACs -I know the AY8910 uses 3 actual logarithmic DACs for output, but that's necessitated by the 3 channel output rather than single mono output of mot contemporaries)

Edited January 22, 2011 by kool kitty89

[DracIsBack]

Kool Kitty 89: I mean this in the nicest way possible: punctuation and grammar are your friends! :-) Don't be afraid to use them!

 

You write such detailed responses but they are sometimes hard to read because of missing periods, commas, sentence fragments and the like.

Edited January 22, 2011 by DracIsBack

[BrianC]

I found the sound in DK Jr. and Mario Bros irratating becuase they are similar to the NES versions, which have much better sound.

[kool kitty89]

Kool Kitty 89: I mean this in the nicest way possible: punctuation and grammar are your friends! :-) Don't be afraid to use them!

 

You write such detailed responses but they are sometimes hard to read because of missing periods, commas, sentence fragments and the like.

Yeah . . . I usually fix most of the spelling stuff (especially given how obvious firefox makes it), but sometimes I'm a bit tired of my own rambling to care about fixing all the grammar stuff; that and AA also has the 1 hour edit time limit which is sometimes an issue. I need to work on that and reducing the rambling to more concise paragraphs/comments too. (sometimes I just get caught up in my own thoughts -and a lot of the comments end up being as much my own musing on the subject as it is directly responding to the topic; sometimes I know I've ended up pushing a more straightforward summary after the fact of preceding musing but don't bother to go back and trim out all the redundant stuff, another reason I need to work on keeping things simpler and thought-out without having to display much of that thought process along with it)

Edited January 24, 2011 by kool kitty89

[BrianC]

One 2600 game that surprised me with music was BMX Airmaster. The title music rocks! I agree on gyruss, as well. I like the 7800's Ms. Pac-Man sounds better than the 2600 and both were tia.