Sega's best console

[Kitsunexus]

Ugh. ALL those "Guardian Heroes" cover arts are crap.

Agreed. Treasure really dropped the ball there, perhaps that's why back then it was a sleeper hit. You had to have great box art back then to entice people to play.

[Black Tiger]

Ha ha I remember the first boss (I think) in Vigilante saying what sounded like "Heya f*cker!" again and again.  Space Harrier on the TG-16 is also pretty bad.  I agree that there are a lot of bad voices on the Genesis, with the Street Fighter games being the prime offenders.  It's like they were routing the voices through the FM channels.  It's too bad, too... because the Genesis is capable of some awesome voice quality.

Thats a great tech demo for the Genesis. 

None of the 16-bit consoles sux at digitized sounds. Even the NES has some great voice clips and the Intellivision rocks with the Intellivoice adaptor.


Some good examples of voice samples on HuCards are:

Champions Forever Boxing
TV Sports Football
TV Sports Basketball
Street Fighter II


Some CD examples:

Ys IV has great samples in all the boss fights. Unfortunately the only save file I have fot it is at the end, past the speaking bosses.

Lords is an obvious one, although there aren't any real words spoken.

I think that Gulliver Boy's battle voices were decent enough.

Snatcher's got the screaming guy in the shooting range.

I believe that all the Neo Geo ports have samples about as good as the originals.

Kabuki Itouryoden has good voice samples.

There have been times when I've meant to record some decent speech examples from Turbo/PCE games, but even now, like always, I'm just too lazy. Maybe, I'll get some recorded tonight.

[Kitsunexus]

Some CD examples:

Those don't count, merely being streaming Redbook audio. A normal CD player can sound that good if you use it to play the game disc.

If we were counting CD Audio games, Popful Mail for SEGA CD would CERTAINLY have been brought up by now.

[Keranu]

None of the 16-bit consoles sux at digitized sounds. Even the NES has some great voice clips and the Intellivision rocks with the Intellivoice adaptor.

Dude, Big Bird's Hide n Seek or whatever it's called for NES has some of the clearest digital voice sound effects I have ever heard on a cartridge! I don't think any hardware necessarily has a technical advantage over another in term's of digitized voices, it just depends how well the designer makes it.

[Turbo D]

I don't think any hardware necessarily has a technical advantage over another in term's of digitized voices, it just depends how well the designer makes it.

I agree, I think alot of the time the designers were either lazy or didn't care.

[Digi.k]

Some CD examples:

Those don't count, merely being streaming Redbook audio. A normal CD player can sound that good if you use it to play the game disc.

If we were counting CD Audio games, Popful Mail for SEGA CD would CERTAINLY have been brought up by now.

I think Black Tiger meant samples speech file stored on the game CD format

Its also pretty amazing how the european cover of Guardian Heroes .. they decided to remove the female heroes from the cover and replace them with male baddies... O_o


anyway back to Download 2.. it runs on the old system card and has a hella lot of sampled speech used during the cut scenes but most of it is is sampled and using the good ol' pce sound card.. warning though that intro has a naked guy on it O_o

[Joe Redifer]

The speech samples from CD games use the ADPCM chip which is not part of the normal Turbo/PC Engine hardware.  That's like attributing all of the voice quality in Sega CD FMV games (which was pretty much perfect) to the Genesis.

[Kitsunexus]

The speech samples from CD games use the ADPCM chip which is not part of the normal Turbo/PC Engine hardware.  That's like attributing all of the voice quality in Sega CD FMV games (which was pretty much perfect) to the Genesis.

I know there's that one Turbo CD game with the infamous "You're too sting-y"...that used Redbook. Popful Mail used Redbook. I guess I'm just misinformed. ._.

[Black Tiger]

The speech samples from CD games use the ADPCM chip which is not part of the normal Turbo/PC Engine hardware.  That's like attributing all of the voice quality in Sega CD FMV games (which was pretty much perfect) to the Genesis.

I thought that the long duration/decent quality digitzed sound in fmv games was streamed like the video.

Are you saying that huge sound files gets dumped into the ADPCM chip during a load?

Because games with real actual (long) dialogue only ever run it over PSG music, its pretty far from perfect*, and stops if you open the CD door...

-while most short voice & sound effects are sparce and low quality like HuCards, play over 'redbook' music, and are still present if you open the CD door. I thought that these sfx were the same as any sfx.

And if the games with a bunch of digitized sfx are only using the ADPCM chip, then why aren't all the sfx in all CD games sampled and clear?



*The dialogue sections in Ys IV that I assumed were streamed are a little popping and hissy like most of that kind(doesn't play off the CD in a music CD player) of in game voice(Snatcher's full of it) in PCE CD games.

But the voice effects in the 3 main villian battles, which use phrases taken from the same speech as the previous rough extended dialogue, is actually cleaner/clearer. I always assumed that these kinds of effects were loaded into the System Card like the graphics.

[Joe Redifer]

You are right, but I am saying that you cannot count streamed ADPCM on Turbo when comparing TurboGrafx games with good/bad voices to Genesis games with good/bad voices since the ADPCM is not part of the TurboGrafx-16 system (it is part of the CD hardware), just as the extra PCM chips in the Sega CD are not part of the Genesis hardware.  Obviously the voices are streamed, there's no way to store all that data in RAM.  Many Sega CD voices (mostly sound effects) are stored in its 512K PCM RAM, though.

[FM-77]

Its also pretty amazing how the european cover of Guardian Heroes .. they decided to remove the female heroes from the cover and replace them with male baddies... O_o

I don't think that's strange at all, considering all japanese drawings of female characters are extremely sexist. Not a good thing to put on a product at all.

Popful Mail used Redbook. I guess I'm just misinformed. ._.

That it did not. Popful Mail did not use either redbook speech nor redbook music.

[Joe Redifer]

The Sega CD version sure didn't have any redbook that I recall.  Was the PC Engine version thew same way?

[Black Tiger]

The Sega CD version sure didn't have any redbook that I recall.  Was the PC Engine version thew same way?

The PCE version is all redbook.

You are right, but I am saying that you cannot count streamed ADPCM on Turbo when comparing TurboGrafx games with good/bad voices to Genesis games with good/bad voices since the ADPCM is not part of the TurboGrafx-16 system (it is part of the CD hardware), just as the extra PCM chips in the Sega CD are not part of the Genesis hardware.  Obviously the voices are streamed, there's no way to store all that data in RAM.  Many Sega CD voices (mostly sound effects) are stored in its 512K PCM RAM, though.

Yeah, but I never mentioned streamed voice, only the sound effect kind. Does the ADPCM really play a role in actual sfx with the PCE?

And if it doesn't allow higher sound quality (is only used for storage), then the samples are still run through the PCE hardware and could be used in a HuCard game. In this case, it'd be the equivelant of graphics in a CD game, where the CD and System Card are storage space, but the graphics are still real examples of what the hardware on its own can do.

Do the PCM chips in the Sega-CD increase quality at all? If not, then non-streamed samples in CD games should also be a good example for the Genesis.

[Joe Redifer]

The ADPCM is another sound chip in itself, just like the 8 channel PCM is a sound chip separate from the Genesis.  It resides in the CD hardware and can only be used by CD games (though it would be REALLY cool to see HuCard or Sega cartridge games use extra features of the CD hardware... though that kind of happens with HuCard games that save).  It's kind of like saying the Genesis can't do an accurate version of Space Harrier 1, even though the 32X (which adds stuff to the Genesis) does a pretty good job at it.

[Keranu]

Yeah, but I never mentioned streamed voice, only the sound effect kind. Does the ADPCM really play a role in actual sfx with the PCE?

Actually don't some CD games do? Shubibin Man 3 comes to mind with the window breaking sound effects in the second level along with various others. I do know that a secret Frozen Utopia project will be use some ADPCM sound effects .