Comment by alisonatwork | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alisonatwork | Hacker News Reader

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From my perspective it was exactly the opposite. FM synths were great because they sounded like synths. Some of the most memorable game soundtracks of the era were that precisely because they had such a characteristic sound to them. When high-quality sampled sounds became the norm, there was nothing unique about game music any more, it just sounded like any other soundtrack. Might as well just play a CD at that point.

The MT-32, from what I understand, was based on the D-50 series, which means in theory it should have had access to unique patches like DigitalNativeDance. The problem with General MIDI is that it limited patches to the lowest common denominator, so even if a ROMpler had the potential to make interesting sounds, composers would stick to the generic ones for compatibility. I think it's no surprise the Sound Blaster (with CD-ROM interface) won over General MIDI in the end, because that way composers could record on professional equipment and everyone would hear it the same. It's too bad that it also ushered in the era of "game music" just being orchestral scores, pop music etc.

There's a lot from the D-50 that's missing on an MT-32, like 50% of the ROM capacity, and all of the filters and effects.

And on top of that, DigitalNativeDance is an outlier. It was (for its day) such a profligate use of ROM that it's not even representative of what a D-50 could do, in general.

Not that this contradicts your main point about GM constraining the choice of sounds.

I think the move to 'plain' digital audio has been liberating. It still is possible to create a game soundtrack on an FM synthesizer, so there's nothing lost except the headaches of incompatible sound card implementations.

If a game really needs to have a 'true' synthesizer it's easy enough to make use of a good software emulation now.

I see what you’re saying, and partially agree.

However, FM synth on PC sound cards, IMO, sounded pretty awful. I would prefer 8-bit NES synth over that of PC synth. E.g. while I do have some nostalgia from the Canon.mid file, I still thought it sounded relatively bad, compared to NES or SNES voices.

I felt the same about the Genesis, which I think used similar synth to older PC FM synth. I always felt that the SNES voices (or even NES 8-bit) sounded far better compared to the Genesis.

But ack this is subjective.

Ironically, the SNES's SPC unit was essentially a very resource constrained ROMpler. While it was capable of synthesis like the NES (in fact, many early third party SNES titles used this, as devs migrating to the platform were more familiar with making music in this style), the ability to load samples and play them back is why so many folks hail it as the console with superior sound of its generation. The YM-2612 in the Genesis did indeed enable composers to create some legendary soundtracks of their own (Anyone who doesn't know Yuzo Koshiro's work for example might enjoy Charles Cornell's dive into the OST of Streets of Rage [1]), the best OSTs for the console were in styles that lent themselves to embrace the sound of the chip, where the SNES, leveraging the ROMpler model, allowed it to make rich music across many more genres.

Speaking of ROMplers and the SNES, these inexpensive ROMplers from Roland and Korg were what much of the music of these consoles were made on, with many of the SNES soundfonts bing made up of highly truncated versions of the ROMpler's samples. The sound of second, third, and fourth generation Final Fantasy games as composed by Nobuo Uematsu heavily used the Roland SoundCanvas SC-55, with the final title he was lead composer on, Final Fantasy 10, essentially using fully rendered tracks using the platform, with then-modern arrangement and production techniques instead of the soundfont + tracker-style music programming used on the SNES and PS1 titles (the PS1's SPU is essentially a souped up SPC700, hearkening back to its roots as the SNES CD, allowing developers to make music in much the same way, albeit with higher resolution samples, more channels, and more effects).

To your point though, the the Genesis' YM-2612, in Yamaha's OPN family was a similar chip to the Yamaha OPL-family chips used by the SoundBlaster platform, albeit it featured complex FM operators that wouldn't be seen on SoundBlaster cards until the versions with "OPL 3" chips became prevalent, which was inconsistent on the SB16 family.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cx73EOaGWU

> FM synth on PC sound cards, IMO, sounded pretty awful.

Only when used as a 'stand in' for a General MIDI sound palette. Some MS-DOS games programmed the OPL-2/3 FM chips directly, making more effective use of the synthesis capabilities. For instance the soundtrack for the MS-DOS version of the first Dune game by Cryo, which still sounds beautiful.

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