Why do people say consoles sound like midi or use midi?
Midi is a industrial standard for musical equipment, connection and files. It defines 128 basic instruments like instrument 01 = grand piano and 27 is electric guitar, and is a standard connector, like a SCART bus for music equipement.
Midi files playing on your pc using 4 MB wave may sound crap, but when played on a $4000 synthesizer it wil sound way better, but at least MIDI makes sure that on both machines the same instruments are used to play the song.
Consoles are NOT made to play MIDI files, so they have no connection to midi or whatsoever.
With this general misconception out of the way, lets look at the neo geo's music hardware to answer you question:
The Neo geo uses the Yamaha 2610 soundchip to produce sound, and NOT the z-80 like some people think. the Z-80 cannot produces sound, it is a CPU. Maybe its used to process data for the Yamaha 2610 I don't know but its not important here.
The details of the Yamaha 2610 are a bit vague because every source says something different, some say it has
- 7 channels pcm
- 6 channels FM
- 3 PSG
= 15 channels of sound
some other source said
- 7 channels pcm
- 4 channels FM
- 3 PSG
- 1 Noice channel
= 14 channels of sound
Doesn't really matter though the most important things are the PCM and the FM, which I think is the main source of the neo geo music
PCM is basicly playback of recorded sounds (like wav files), so at least 1 or 2 are used for sound effects and voices.
FM is a method of generating sound not by using samples but by an internal synthesis, so the chip itself produces the sound instead of playback like pcm does. I think this is what the topic starters refer to with "MIDI"
The ideal scenario would be like a CD-based console, streaming audio from a CD (redbook audio), but alas, the neo geo is a cartridge based system. Well, then store wav files of the soundtrack on the cartridge. Hmm then again better not or we would end up having 5000 megabit carts.
So how the neo produces his music is like this:
Recording short samples (wav files kind of) of the actual instruments used, and playbacking them in the pcm channels (5 remaining out of 7) like an instrument (for example recording one note of a real piano, and use it in the game to play various notes) plus some channels played by the FM chip. Drums are most certainly samples. So mosty the soundtrack ARE played by actual instruments. Like the Esaka and Beauty and Beat tune on KoF2000, those are actual sampled guitars you hear. As a matter of fact, all the instruments you hear in those tunes are recorded real instruments (I think, in beauty & beast I'm not sure about the string that playes the melody).
You may wonder why it sounds different from the Arranged soundtrack then. there are muliple answers to that question
- Its called ARRANGED soundtrack and not ORIGINAL sountrack, the meaning of Arranged is "with other instruments". you can see it's like a sort of remixed, reworked version, like in the BEST ARRANGED 94-2000 version of Tears you hear saxophone and stuff and no drums.
- Soundprocessing. Arranged soundtracks are recorded in music studios. The people recording it process the music using compressors, reverb, chorus etc to make it sound better. The neo geo doesnt have those things in its sound chip. I believe the newer generation consoles like dreamcast do have a few of those things inside its soundchip.
- Aging sound chip. I cant find the info, but i don't think the pcm chip can play at 44.1 mhz quality (which equals CD audio). Most soundchip at that time could only play samples at 22.5 or something or even lower. You can clearly hear it when you listen to the KoF2001 Original soundtrack, this is like EXACTLY how the artist wanted the music to sound. You will hear that although its the same soundtrack, but somehow sounds clearer. Also you can hear the "MIDI-bass, deep sound" mentioned by the topic starter. So its how they wanted it to be!"
- Memory problems. Altough short sounds like a drum beat or guitar stabs are easily recorded, some "longer" sounds like strings or guitar solo's here you can't just record one note of it, you must record the entire piece to faithfully reproduce it. Like the guitar playing the melody in KoF 2000 Goodbye Esaka the guitar is just one sound playing the melodie, compared to the AST's guitar. It's difficult to explain this due to my bad english. Anyway because it would take to much space on the romcart they will not record any long fragments of sound.
For that the newer KoF's having worse music, it might be because of inexperience with the hardware, since the those where not made by SNK. It would seem that SNK had mastered the technique to use the sound hardware over the years, just compare the sound of the first few games with kof 1999/2000 you will hear a huge increase in the sounds (as well as in grafics for that matter).
Anyway this was my 2 cents, I'm no expert so I may be wrong at some points.
