Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

[BIL]

I made my Donkey Kong and TGM ports on a dare such as this, so be careful what you say

Remember, [counter force] and [zero teleport] buttons are ok, but the weapon menu is a feature! ;3

[Sumez]

I have no idea what those things mean. Alien Soldier is a mystery to me. Never figured out how to play it. Treasure seem unable to just make a straightforward action game

[spmbx]

I have no idea what the last few pages of this thread even mean but it would be nice if peope would just get a room already. I'm quite sure it's not even remotely related to the subject at hand.

[BIL]

I have no idea what the last few pages of this thread even mean but it would be nice if peope would just get a room already. I'm quite sure it's not even remotely related to the subject at hand.

Get a room, what for? (⌐■ w ■) Who's this Peope, some kinda... GAY GUY?!? (■｀w´■) tell 'em hmu @ tharuggedbiruford.bowcat.net, just no gynoug stuff ok, I swear to fuckin god it stopped being funny after 3D printing, I don't have space in my house for any more PVC Dickmen for fuck sake

...Mr. Koshiro, if you happen to see this thread, Synphonic Suite from ACTRAISER saved me from some moderately mean streets! When I saw it in EGM's import sidebar, and realised it wasn't just me recording BGM off the TV speakers, I knew there was a better world out there somewhere. ;w;

Best of luck with the new project, and thanks for all the great music!

There it's back on topic now.

[DietSoap]

I haven't actually seen this demo. I'm not surprised it already exists, it's just escaped me. Glad to hear someone out there is more interested about this than I am, really. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

Is it this 2019 one by TiagoSC? It seems pretty cool. Not sure if he's still working on it. I dunno how I feel about using 256h, but I figure he just wanted to do a more direct port. You'd need to do a bit of work to make it feel good to play at 320h, and you would never be able to call it a direct port at that point.

That's the one, yeah. Would've been awesome to play the full game, but it seems like it was just a proof-of-concept. The SNES res is lame for sure, but I get that it probably made the design/converting/etc a lot faster and simpler on top of just retaining the look of a 1:1 port better.

[BIL]

This thread's actually got me interested in my MD again, and by extension its contemporaries. I've mostly been catching up on arcade stuff via ACA and ShotTriggers, the last several years.

Neo-Geo was really on a different level that gen, but I actually think the Mega Drive was the all around best piece of kit after it despite releasing 2 years earlier than the snes.

Same same. As prestigious as TFIV and Alien Soldier are, I don't consider them extraordinary by MD standard, per se. Just the highest peaks of a lineup stacked with fiery killers. I'll go to bat for BioMetal and Contra Spirits any day, among others, but it's typically in the sense "These could pass for MD greats."

Not a technical argument on my part, ofc. I just know the kind of games I love, and how I like 'em done. Of that great PCE/MD/MVS/SFC lineup, MD gave the best quality/quantity of them. (MVS because AES doesn't have Shock Troopers, yurusan)

[Lander]

I can do domain-specific languages + compilers if this Alien Soldier Expendables crew needs some complexity-management for its ASM (b｀w´ )

Reverse-engineered the character mechanics once, as well - another of those yes good now to never do anything with it ever projects that we hobbyists seem to so love. Perhaps not so impressive, since it was in a bunk language for a bunk engine that shall go unnamed, but it had a nifty many-jointed boss and felt pretty playable.

I ain't want nothin' to do with that SNES sound chip though. Damn kids with their 'samples' and 'large memory', true artistes make do with sine waves and more sine waves!

Okay, so you're something much worse than the peanut gallery at best. I am not interested in fighting dumb internet battles for your or anyone else's benefit.

My mistake for leaving room for interpretation - I care about the points you're both trying to prove, not the Kektastic Dramatic Battle runoff. Public post, interested audience; it's not wholly unbelievable given a logical razor or two.

We'd best move on from Irascible Groundskeeper VS Danish Craft Brew if the conversation actually being had is a fight better left to PM - or more practically, the time-tested axiom of if you have nothing nice (/ constructive) to say then just leave it.

[evil_ash_xero]

What in the hell are you guys on about?

I skimmed over the last couple of pages, and are we having a console war conversation? About consoles from the 90s?
Far out.

Anyway, the game looks amazing. I hope it isn't too short, or has some other shortcomings that aren't visible in the previews. The Engrish is superb.
Almost as good as "Rawket Lawnchair" from MS 3.

[Austin]

What in the hell are you guys on about? I skimmed over the last couple of pages, and are we having a console war conversation? About consoles from the 90s? Far out

Thank "Dip-shat" as always.

[evil_ash_xero]

What in the hell are you guys on about? I skimmed over the last couple of pages, and are we having a console war conversation? About consoles from the 90s? Far out

Thank "Dip-shat" as always.

Ah, I see.

I deleted my comment about my opinion on the SNES vs MD thing. I didn't want to get involved.
All these years later, people still heated up.

That being said, I think the vast majority of gamers know the strengths and weaknesses of both systems, and it shows in their libraries.
I like them both for different reasons. I think the MD will be a great home for this new shmup.

[Lander]

I skimmed over the last couple of pages, and are we having a console war conversation? About consoles from the 90s?

Console war? No way, this is a polite slap-fight between grown-ups; much more noble and enlightened than when the kids do it

[BrianC]

I skimmed over the last couple of pages, and are we having a console war conversation? About consoles from the 90s?

Console war? No way, this is a polite slap-fight between grown-ups; much more noble and enlightened than when the kids do it

What a coincidence! Yuzo Koshiro did the music for Slap Fight MD!

[Despatche]

Why do people always feel a need to waltz into conversations they don't care about, solely to let everyone know they don't care?

Thank "Dip-shat" as always.

Literally all you've done here is childish namecalling. What is the point? I don't really go through peoples' posting history, but I'm sure most of your posts are of this caliber, it's certainly what I remember.

That's the one, yeah. Would've been awesome to play the full game, but it seems like it was just a proof-of-concept.

Yeah, that seems like a lot of these, sadly. I get it, it's hard to finish anything, but the truly hard part is already done...

The SNES res is lame for sure, but I get that it probably made the design/converting/etc a lot faster and simpler on top of just retaining the look of a 1:1 port better.

Yes, it's too convenient for its own good. Pretty sure this is why Fire Mustang is 256x224, as the original USAAF Mustang is also 256x224. As a result, Fire ends up having an identical look and feel, just with simpler graphics and some gameplay changes.

I ain't want nothin' to do with that SNES sound chip though. Damn kids with their 'samples' and 'large memory', true artistes make do with sine waves and more sine waves!

I didn't really talk about that wretched thing, but it's probably the #1 reason why I never want to work on the SFC. I have come to hate that chip's idea of "Gaussian sound interpolation" so completely. I am willing to sacrifice much to get that awful muffling away from my ears. It is very tiring to see Nintendo fanboys pretend that the SFC has "clear" sound, because it has the exact opposite thing by design.

[Lander]

I didn't really talk about that wretched thing, but it's probably the #1 reason why I never want to work on the SFC. I have come to hate that chip's idea of "Gaussian sound interpolation" so completely. I am willing to sacrifice much to get that awful muffling away from my ears. It is very tiring to see Nintendo fanboys pretend that the SFC has "clear" sound, because it has the exact opposite thing by design.

I take it as an ideological thing; always favoured tools that start with the primitives and build upward, rather than papering over them in the name of a smooth but simplified user experience. Harder to use (and so destined for underutilization,) but ultimately more expressive and scalable.

I'd consider it worthwhile to implement a virtual OPL in modern code for dynamic control, higher sample rates, etc. Whereas SNES - and arguably, most pipelines favoured by industry - is stuck in time; dump a soundfont, and you can reproduce it perfectly in your DAW of choice (c.f. meme hits like We Are Number One But It's Mega Man X Guitars,) but meaningfully improving that output is impossible without remaking it.

[Sumez]

I'm probably one of the few people masochistic enough to have tried working on a functional SNES sound engine, and the thing is definitely hell to work with for a lot of different reasons. You're constantly fighting over weird issues with the limited way the main CPU communicates with the audio subsystem using the same program that you need to make from scratch to actually play the sounds as well - and fitting everything into the very limited amount of audio RAM you have is a never-ending battle. This is one reason most SNES games have very low quality sound, the other obviously being the gaussian filter (which is intended to mask low samplerates and artifacts from the "BRR" compression).

It's possible to pre-emphasize samples in a way that counteracts that filter, however, and it's something that have been employed by modern homebrewers to some extent. If anyone tried to do anything similar back in the heydays of the SNES, they were probably British. I haven't implemented it into my tracker software yet, so I'm not sure how well it works, but it's on the backlog for sure.

[MintyTheCat]

To conclude : the Megadrive's YM2612 is better than what the SNES has for sound. But I could have told you that

To be honest, the "FM Sound" thing seems to attract some and deter others. I think a lot of this is at that many of us grew up with it in the games that we played and it's what we associate with that era of gaming.

To this day I find the track for Undead Line : Cemetery level to be absolutely brilliant. Some really nice audio examples on the MD in general and I keep coming back to music done for Xeno Crisis.

Oddly enough, I only did audio programming using the YM2413 myself; I never got around to playing seriously with the YM2612 but I have the DAFM synth here ready when I wish to do so.

I have had a Yamaha DX7 for years though, so the entire FM thing programming and sound creation is something that I'm accustomed to.

Fro sound direction on the SNES : to be honest, I always tended to take a commercial game ROM and look for calls to the registers and memory locations associated with the point of interest. Would it be possible to check some commercial SNES game ROMs to work out how the pros back then did things?
I know basically nothing about the SNES myself as I spent most of my time focusing on the Megadrive

[Sumez]

I love the FM sound, and technically you could create something that sounds almost exactly like it using well designed samples on SNES. It wouldn't be *just* as crisp, but it'd be better than what you'd normally expect from a SNES. Just, no one tried to do so, because it didn't make any sense at the time. They wanted to exploit the SNES sampler to do what other sound chips couldn't do.
The irony of it is that I think you'd absolutely get the best results from SNES audio by sticking entirely to electronic instruments using short looped waveforms. You'd be able to use full 32khz samples without sacrificing much memory, and they'd suffer less from the interpolation filter. I think the best *sounding* SNES soundtracks out there have quite an electronic sound. But I agree with everyone who says the muddled sound you normally associate with the system isn't doing it any favors.

Fro sound direction on the SNES : to be honest, I always tended to take a commercial game ROM and look for calls to the registers and memory locations associated with the point of interest. Would it be possible to check some commercial SNES game ROMs to work out how the pros back then did things?
I know basically nothing about the SNES myself as I spent most of my time focusing on the Megadrive

I don't think you'd learn much from that. The SNES sound hardware itself is hell to work with, but in terms of what you need to write to the registers of the sampler, it's painfully straight-forward, especially compared to the black magic which is FM synthesis. There's a sample index, a KeyOn/KeyOff command for each voice, and a bunch of registers to modify pitch, etc. The issues with it comes entirely from the act of programming the SPC part of the sound hardware.

The whole thing is documented quite well right here, it's a much better teacher than looking at contemporary games of the era: https://wiki.superfamicom.org/spc700-reference

The majority of games used the sound engine made by Nintendo and distributed with the official SDK. A lot of devs would modify it, but I think the people who wrote their own thing from scratch are largely a minority. People have worked pretty hard to document this by finding similarities in code between various games - KungFuKirby of the snes dev community especially deserves a ton of credit for their work here.

[MintyTheCat]

Hi Sumez,

there's some really good information about the SNES hardware you linked there

I had a quick look at it in the sound section. I then had a look for example programming of the sound hardware and found some disassemblies:

https://www.retroreversing.com/source-c ... tendo-snes

There's a description of the Capcom format here : https://wiki.superfamicom.org/capcom-music-format

Final Fight & Demon's Crest (Capcom) disassemblies are given here: https://github.com/FredYeye/various-gam ... _fight.asm
https://github.com/FredYeye/various-gam ... _crest.asm

Doesn't look like they are full though, only snippets. Perhaps use something like IDA or the tracer built into an Emulator to trace execution along with a static disassembly of the game ROMs.

I love the SNES myself but I've never once looked at the actual hardware I spent more time with the Megadrive to be honest over the years.
I do know a bit more about the NES though and I used to program the Commodore 64 - 6502 assembly.

With all those timers and commands and such and then the DSP - yes, it looks a bit involved and very, very different to working with an FM chip for sure.

Nice to know that folks have been collecting information about the hardware.
Personally, I don't have much time these days to play with game related projects but I do miss messing around on the Megadrive

EDIT:

I had a quick look to see if Deflemask supports the SNES, it doesn't at present, only the NES and C64 but nothing close.

[Sumez]

Really sorry about the massive derailing of this thread. But I love old console tech, so I latch on to any chance to talk about it.

Doesn't look like they are full though, only snippets. Perhaps use something like IDA or the tracer built into an Emulator to trace execution along with a static disassembly of the game ROMs.

I think Mesen's debugger is one of the best debuggers I've ever tried. Its SNES emulation comes with debuggers for every processor it emulates, including the SPC chip, so if you're interested in that stuff it might be fun to look into. It's super user friendly.

I do know a bit more about the NES though and I used to program the Commodore 64 - 6502 assembly.

The SNES main CPU is basically a superpowered 6502, so it should be *very* familiar if you're used to 6502. You can program it entirely like one (and will even function exactly as one if you enable the "emulation" register), but you can change the accumulator or index registers from 8-bit to 16-bit at will, which overcomes a lot of the cumbersome steps that you usually have to work around on the 6502, such as 16 bit arithmetics or large data structures. The primary thing that makes it "harder" to program is making sure your source code knows which state your registers are expected to be in at which points in the code. That makes disassembly kinda wonky too.

I had a quick look to see if Deflemask supports the SNES, it doesn't at present, only the NES and C64 but nothing close.

Furnace Tracker is the current hotness, and it supports SNES.
If you're curious about it, I'll let you into my SNES tracker project too. But it's currently in a bit of a broken state after I haven't been working on it for a couple of months. I need to get back into it.

To be perfectly honest I don't know why people would be interested in SNES music in the current day, because it's basically a low-quality version of what you can do with modern hardware, unlike dedicated sound chips like PSG or FM synths, which have a completely unique sound with a certain appeal.
But I thought it would be fun to work on a tracker project like that, and when I aired the idea with the chiptune people I knew, they were all quite excited about it.

[SuperDeadite]

Limited Edition A2 size posters for sale at Beep if anyone wants one.

https://www.beep-shop.com/ec/products/d ... K-1--59495

[DietSoap]

Limited Edition A2 size posters for sale at Beep if anyone wants one.

https://www.beep-shop.com/ec/products/d ... K-1--59495

The pilot is an anime girl? Has anyone let xxx1993 know?

[AyeYoYoYO]

Does it feature any truly unique mechanics or weapon/power-up styles that no other MD sumo features ?

Def expect that the OST will skyrocket to the top ranked MD OST lists.

[Lemnear]

FULL TRAILER:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PP59afi7FD8

I think it's the best pixel art ever made...it really brutalizes Salamander III

There is no date but it looks like it will be released for MegaDrive/Genesis, PS4/PS5, XBOX Series X|S, Switch 1 and Steam.
I'll take this one 100%.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

FULL TRAILER:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PP59afi7FD8

I think it's the best pixel art ever made...it really brutalizes Salamander III

There is no date but it looks like it will be released for MegaDrive/Genesis, PS4/PS5, XBOX Series X|S, Switch 1 and Steam.
I'll take this one 100%.

If you notice at the end of that particular Earthion youtube video, the names of "Limited Run Games" and "Super Deluxe" appear -- meaning the various console ports of Earthion will be distributed/sold by themselves, indeed. The Mega Drive/Sega Genesis version of Earthion, of course, is the much-preferred version to buy hands down -- accept no substitutes and use only the real genuine article/medium as originally intended/meant to be.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[Bar81]

The issue with LRG/Super Deluxe is that they're such a scummy company. Ignoring their general shady business dealings, see the recent Shantae GBA release where the carts include used chips instead of readily available new chips. Of course Retro-Bit (which manufactured the Shantae carts) is part of the scumbaggery along with LRG since they're also trying to pretend that used chips were not used:

https://www.timeextension.com/news/2025 ... ae-advance

Hopefully, this exposing of their shady behavior will at least ensure that the Earthion MD release doesn't have used chips. But ultimately it would have been preferable if another publisher was used for the MD release.

[spmbx]

Just play the rom in your everdrive. Chances are your everdrive is going to outlive whatever LRG will fabricate anyway.

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

Almost as good as "Rawket Lawnchair" from MS 3.

I'd always assumed the announcer is trying his best to sound like Arnie...

[Steven]

Has there been any word on how many megabits this is? Probably "a lot", but it's always cool to check out ROM sizes for games on old consoles.

[Sumez]

Even if the game only takes up XX megabits, the ICs it's actually being printed on can probably fit a lot more, since it's actually hard to find off-the-shelf mass produced "rom chips" (probably NAND flash) that are even close to as small as MegaDrive games used to be

[SuperDeadite]

Has there been any word on how many megabits this is? Probably "a lot", but it's always cool to check out ROM sizes for games on old consoles.

Yuzo Koshiro said the target was a 32meg rom on twitter quite some time ago.