Per VognsenAnother tidbit about GBA, it had an 8-bit DAC with no hardware mixing and a really awful analog output stage. But almost every title other than the Golden Sun games seems to have used Nintendo's official audio driver, which did 8-bit software mixing, so it was much noisier than it needed to be when mixing multiple voices.
cancel@pervognsen every Nintendo console after SNES had a horrible audio system. it's like they were traumatized by the SPC700 and refused to ever allocate anything to it again. even the Switch has dirty DAC output.
@cancel The SPC700 was so over-engineered. I love it.
@cancel Regarding the GBA, I wonder how much better analog components would really have added to the BoM. I know Nintendo has always been penny pinching but it can't have been much, surely? And while software mixing and DSP isn't cheap, it's at least a sliding scale of trade-offs you can make. Though given that essentially everyone used Nintendo's awful driver, apparently no-one cares.
@cancel Anyway, I was thinking about this while wondering how far you could push the GBA audio quality if you did proper noise shaping and tried to compensate for the specific analog characteristics of the DAC and output stage in software. Like for a dedicated mod player or something like that.
John Kaniarz@cancel @pervognsen N64 was decent, but it cut into your compute budget so a lot of games didn’t do much with it.
@jkaniarz @pervognsen I was ready to say "it eats away at the vertex processing DSP, so everything ran at a low sample rate. the PlayStation (non-redbook!) was pristine in comparison." in case someone brought it up
@cancel @pervognsen Game Cube is good now that people reverse engineered the digital out port and concert direct to HDMI. Perhaps the last true wavetable console.
@jkaniarz @pervognsen except you can trade the audio RAM (ARAM) via a convoluted system to try to get more memory because the GameCube had a measly 24MB of pseudo-SRAM, so later GameCube titles and Wii titles all would eat into ARAM and limit how nice the instrument samples could be!
@jkaniarz @pervognsen also gamecube isn't wavetable, is it? it's samples.