Super MIDI Pak – Use Your SNES as a MIDI Synthesizer | Hacker News Reader

Super MIDI Pak – Use Your SNES as a MIDI Synthesizer

supermidipak.com

109 pointsrocky113825 comments

Holy shit. Why does no one do advertisements like that anymore?

I felt like I was watching an infomercial, in the best possible way. By the end of the 2.5 minute video, I knew (a) what it was, (b) what it did, (c) how it was better than alternatives, (d) how much it cost, & (e) how to order one.

Hats off to the creator for recording a damn good video.

How is it better than the alternatives?

Modern ads focus on pathos and ethos. They want you to identify with a tribe/idea, they want you to feel something so you will be compelled to buy it. Look at some movie theatre car ads. They are all about "freedom" or "power" or "control".

For tech companies, Google product ads are always about a "smart and quirky" way of life, Apple is about privacy/connectivity/whatever the trend of day is. For Microsoft, it is productivity. For Facebook, bringing people together and empowerment.

Most of it is bull**** but it works much better than a raw summary of specifications.

Someone give this man a bachelor in marketing. Bravo!

I believe the question was more about clarifying point (c) of the grandparent. At a guess, it's the comparison to programming audio into the SNES by hand, showing a clear value proposition in comparison to the baseline.

Yes, thank you. I thought there exist other SNES cartridges that help you make music, and this one`s better. But I guess the alternative is "program the chip". Which is definitely much more difficult.

I’m tempted to get this.

But I think I’d even more want to have one for the NES. Does one exist?

Edit: the video actually demoed samples that sounded like NES, so maybe that’s included. Either way, I’m supporting this — super cool, and I would love to be able to tinker with songs using authentic samples from SNES.

I’ve seen people use Gameboys as instruments.

You can use Chipsynth SFC to rip and play back SNES samples in any DAW: https://www.plogue.com/products/chipsynth-sfc.html

Also, many SF2 soundfonts for SNES games already exist and use authentic samples. The SNES adds a low pass filter, which you can approximate with EQ, and it has an echo effect that can be replicated with a short delay.

The NES sound hardware is pretty simple and easily emulated, you can find some nice virtual synths: https://www.mattmontag.com/projects-page/nintendo-vst You might even just be able to use any old synth and its basic square, triangle, etc. waves to get really close to the NES sound.

I used to produce one for the NES: https://github.com/jareklupinski/chip-maestro / https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jarek/chip-maestro-an-n...

Though if you're serious about using it for music production, I recommend popping the CPU out and dropping it into a dedicated board so you're not dealing with stuff like cartridge grime issues in a studio: https://github.com/jareklupinski/standalone-nes-synth

Personally, i'm partial to the Gameboy Megamachine as demonstrated by Look Mum No Computer, although it's a bit more cumbersome to set up:

https://youtu.be/xpB0_YWPwD8

Not super related but just wanted to make a comment praising Look Mum No Computer. If you've got an interest in analog electronics, synthesized music and just crazy stuff in general, his videos are great. Dude's one of those crazy, brilliant geniuses.

Still bummed my parents tossed my SNES when I went away to college – over fifteen years ago.

This might be fun for just foolin' around. And yet for the same $100, a person can find a used hardware MIDI synth that's programmable (knobs/pushbutton/display) with it's own built in sample ROM and RAM, and probably more than one pair of 16-channel MIDI I/Os.

Awesome. I love that people are coming up with homebrew carts for old systems like this, but does anyone have insight into how Nintendo might might respond to this legally? I just thought they were really litigious and it seems like something their lawyers would be all over.

This is cool, but we have had cycle-accurate emulation of the SNES S-SMP sound processor for years. Aside from the fun factor, what is the advantage of using Super MIDI Pak to play MIDI on a physical S-SMP versus doing the exact same thing in software?

The video seems to indicate the product is intended for live play. I think emulation wouldn’t work in that case since there are often unpredictable latencies when running available emulators on consumer OSes. Sometimes emulators skip as well, which would be terrible in a live setting.

Wonder how it'd work with the MiSTer FPGA

This is way too cool. Gutted I threw out my MIDI keyboard 2 weeks ago :(

Comments like this serve to further justify my hoarder tendencies.

You cant cleanly recurse if you hold onto the head of a stream

luckily keyboards are bulky enough lots of people do that, so you probably could aquire one again for a reasonable price ;)

Could one use emulated SNES to do the same thing?

yes, you just need a midi controller, actually, not even that! just the freely available samples/soundfonts, then load it up in your daw or sequencer

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