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.
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.
@cancel @pervognsen my idea of wavetable is influenced by the claims of late 90’s consumer sound cards. AFAICT from the docs, the cube could play tracker music in hardware.