http://www.kazblox.byethost6.com/web_media/s1betadac.mp3 Super super bump, but I took this audio clip from LOst's slowed down version of part of the CES 1991 video. Listening closely to the Winter Prototype audio, If you turn your volume way up and listen closely, it sounds like the kick/snare DAC samples sound alot stronger in a different pitch. Does anybody hear this difference too?
It's a known fact that the drum samples were originally played at a lower pitch (the snare clearly, the kick or timpani not too sure). There are several pieces of footage that show this. Here is a more obvious example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3xZUSr2JAM
I don't know if it's been found out yet, but after listening to the commercial, it seems that when Sonic collects 50 rings, he gets a 1-Up instead of the usual 100 rings. The extra life music plays at that point during the Green Hill Zone run.
The solution is actually quite simple. If they wouldn't have wanted the SEGA speech, they would've probably used the standard DAC driver used in nearly all SMPS 68k games at this time. So that's what I did - I changed the DAC driver parameters in SMPSPlay to the ones of the default SMPS 68k DAC driver (used in e.g. MJ's Moonwalker, Fatal Fury, Golden Axe 2) And I got this result: http://vgm.mdscene.net/misc/S1 Title Screen (generic SMPS 68k DAC driver).vgz
The footage that MarkeyJester linked also shows some in-progress work of the zones as they were at the time. Labyrinth Zone Act 3 has an issue with the slide where the water is cut off and blocks disappear. The section that disappears via the switch is also in a broken state with the objects not finalised and various tiles missing. There's an invincibility on top of the Green Hill Zone Act 1 loop and the aformentioned extra life for collecting 50 rings is evidenced by the strange ring formation in the middle of the double tunnel section. I also have to wonder if that SEGA Genesis logo on the title screen was ever in game or put on top in post-production.
Can we get these recordings in a format most people can use? Really wanna check out that above link but I have no idea what I'm doing when it downloads.
It's for a VGM player. Putting it in Audio Overload plays a DAC-less version of the Sonic 1 Title Screen music, but that might be just the software not recognizing or something else. It's edited into the video footage. A logo with that kind of palette would be highly impossible to reproduce on a Genesis unless you horribly dither and filter it.
Considering that the VGM format is the only non-MP3 format for MegaDrive music (I.e. like NSF, just for 8 and 16-bit Sega systems), I assumed everyone would have a VGM player by now. Anyway, have an MP3.
Yes, it plays them at a different sample rate. The internal "rate" value is the same, but the DAC driver is slower, resulting in a lower overall sample rate. You need at least in_vgm 0.40.3 (from December 2012) or later. (I maybe should've disabled the DPCM compression, so that it would've worked in 0.40.0.)
Incidentally, is there a version for Foobar2000 that doesn;t crash the player on trying to load? I note it only ever seems to happen on .vgm files and not .vgz ones.
I don't know. kode54 is developing foo_gep and I don't have Foobar2000 installed. You can just try to see if the most recent version works better. kode54 has added most features from VGMPlay/in_vgm to foo_gep, btw, so it should be able to play the VGM logs from SMPSPlay correctly.
...holy crap, that actually FIXED IT. I actually use foo_gep anyway, and the last time I looked on that page and updated foo_gep it made zero difference, so it looks like it's finally been updated - kode54, I know you browse here occasionally so if you see this, THANK YOU muchly.
Glad that worked, although foobar2000 as of v1.1 should have a built-in components update checker, easily accessible either from the Help menu, or from Preferences -> Components. I did try to keep it almost up to date, but it still needs a load of work, and is quite messy after adding all those chips that I did add. Unfortunately, everyone else is working on their own code bases, so mine doesn't usually see pull requests for major features.
Yeah, I still have a crapton of components from pre-1.1 that I've been too lazy to find replacements for as the player's been upgraded, as most of them did what they needed to do - about the only one I've tried since has been foo_gep, and as such it's the only one that's not in the foobar2000/components folder. =P I'm aware of this feature but I've never used it. Fair enough. Thanks for your efforts anyway!
Might also be worth noting the DAC snare samples used in Sonic 1 and 2 are from the Roland TR-626 but much higher than the drum-machine outputs (even though you can change that- it doesn't go toooo high). There are also used in the demo tracks released a while back in the game's demo soundtrack but at their proper pitches.
We know why those rings were changed, right? Because of the bottom boundary bug, that this windtunnel section especially suffers from. This was probably noticed at some point later, and a checkpoint was put there to make up for it. Maybe they couldn't figure out how to fix the bug themselves, so this was the best they could do.
