Radiant Silvergun: Music is off Chip? Wow.

[Rade]

I haven't played this in years and I pop it in for a go yesterday. I always assumed the music was redbook, but upon closer inspection, it appears to be produced using the Saturn's chip. Alls I gots to says is Wow. If I were to compare this to what was produced on PSone, like FFVII or some of the non redbook stuff on Wild Arms (which was really good, actually, but paled compared to the full orchestra stuff they had), I would have to say Saturn was capable of a lot more than the Psone was. I always assumed the PSone had better sound hardware. I guess now I know better.

[Segata_Sanshiro]

Yes, they did the same with Ikaruga.

Saturn's sound hardware from a technical standpoint is better, but it doesn't have compression, so you wind up with games having horribly downsampled sfx to fit in the memory (look at street fighter alpha 2, 3, damn near anything really).

[Rade]

God, why did every Sega system up to Saturn have bad sampling? You would have thought they would have learned their lesson with the Genesis after all the flack they got for the grainy voices...but I always enjoyed the music from the genesis, at least.

The SNES was awesome at doing orchestral type stuff, but the Genesis killed it at base heavy stuff; like streets of rage. SNES music sounded washed out a lot of the time.

[Big Shady]

God, why did every Sega system up to Saturn have bad sampling? You would have thought they would have learned their lesson with the Genesis after all the flack they got for the grainy voices...but I always enjoyed the music from the genesis, at least.

Because compression and decompression take up more cycles then just getting the a small sample rate. Extra hardware would have been required to get a better sample rate, spending the Saturn to an even higher price point, most likely out of the reach of most consumers.

[Kiken]

All STV games use yellow-book audio. So STV-to-Saturn ports like Radiant Silvergun, Soukyuugurentai and Cotton Boomerang are all using chip-music.

[Xander Crews]

Radiant Silvergun has an excellent soundtrack

but then so doesFinal Fantasy Tactics

both were composed by the Hitoshi Sakimoto.

[Rade]

I'm a sucker for a recurring musical theme in videogames.

Kinda like Shinobi 3

[Kirk Foiden]

Saturn's sound processor was a very good one. You'd be amazed at the stuff that the Saturn pumps out with its own sound processor. Funny enough, the Dreamcast's sound processor was even better (utilizing a technology not far removed from an instrument in my own sound studio), but it hardly got utilized.

Still, Saturn had a very nice sound processor, for what its worth. In fact, a good many Sakura Taisen series tunes were played strictly from the Saturn's sound processor, before it went to Dreamcast and then the PS2. That was indeed nothing to mock at.