Street Fighter II, Sound System Internals | Hacker News Reader

Street Fighter II, Sound System Internals

fabiensanglard.net

150 pointsibobev12 comments

I remember seeing the cabinet as a teen for the first time at a convenience store and hearing that punch in the intro sequence. It was such a hard sounding punch sound. You knew this game was banging.

Might just be because I grew up with the SNES version, but I found I prefer most of the tracks from it to their original Arcade counterparts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cegjc9BIlnU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFbn4nuTMj8

The arcade version clearly has more layers to it which make it more interesting, but the instruments just sound too MIDI to me. I kinda wish there had been some version with all of the arcade's layers but the SNES chip's soundfonts.

This is most likely because the SNES's audio was entire ADPCM based. The CPS1 was basically doing MIDI, while all audio on the SNES was done with samples, and so the samples could be made to sound more realistic than typical MIDI.

The SNES sound is has less midtones, so it sounds more crisp (ala disco smile). And to me it also sounds a bit more smooth. The general mix is just balanced better, layers are more separated, and you can actually enjoy the bassline

If anyone else was curious and wanted to extract the samples to a usable format you can extract the contents with the repo linked in the article, convert with the other tool linked and finally convert from PCM to WAV with ffmpeg:

  node bin/extract-samples.js sf2ua

  for f in *.vox; do echo "Processing $f file.."; ./adpcm/adpcm od "$f" "$f.pcm"; ffmpeg -f s16le -ar 8000 -ac 1 -i "$f.pcm" -ar 44100 -ac 2 "$f.wav"; done

I still play this game virtually every other day in it’s unbeatable SEGA Saturn port. Killer 2 player action.

I’m lucky enough to have an actual cabinet at a local arcade here in Toronto - given it survives Ontario’s ludicrous treatment of small businesses during COVID - and I’m consistently amazed at how well the game holds up after 30(?) years.

Where is this arcade located in Toronto?

https://www.zedeighty.com/games-list lists Street Fighter Anniversary Edition (Ultracade, 2004) along with Street Fighter II (Gottlieb, 1993) - pinball. There is also https://www.tilttoronto.com/#header-games-list-section

thanks for the nostalgia, the arcade days were fun.

Shoryuken! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2v3t4XW910

"How does Street Fighter accelerates playback speed when a round situation becomes critical (contestant low health). It doesn't. These are hard-coded separate music tracks".

That's surprising.

Not really. The low health tracks aren't just sped up, they're compositions in their own right. Because of that, a separate track ID makes total sense as they are different music tracks.

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