Ok, I know it's been explained before but for the life of me, I can't find the post..

...what differences between the GBA sound hardware and SPC700 exist that account for the noticeable inferiority in the quality of sound from the GBA in the SNES ports? Other than the speaker sucking, of course.

> Ok, I know it's been explained before but for the life of me, I can't find the
> post..
>
> ...what differences between the GBA sound hardware and SPC700 exist that account
> for the noticeable inferiority in the quality of sound from the GBA in the SNES
> ports? Other than the speaker sucking, of course.

The SNES Audio Processing Unit has a DSP capable of mixing 8 channels in stereo, with gaussian resampling and a channel-toggled echo effect. The whole audio module was ahead of its time, really.

The GBA on the other hand mixes all of its sound in software, except for the Gameboy Color sound channels, and writes the result to a stereo digital-to-analog converter. The GBA processor isn't really powerful enough for a lot of polyphony or interpolated resampling or post-processing effects.

-nZero

> -nZero

Thanks, man :)

GBA uses a 2 channel DPCM output and it since there's no dedicated sound chip has to do it all via software and from the main CPU (and the secondary.) This restricts most games to having lower 8-11khz audio samples and simple melody as to not screw up the game itself and limit it. SNES used a dedicated chip that output at 33khz (nearly CD) and used 8bit samples over a 16bit chip(or was it the other way around I forget.)

SNES ports though can come VERY close, FF6 most recently is a great case for it as while some sfx are crappier and a few tunes are dulled down, some actually sound superior including the big opera (aria) scene.

asf