SNES audio channels fix/enhancement

User avatar
ioev
Posts: 31
Joined: Mon May 25, 2020 1:56 pm
Has thanked: 3 times
Been thanked: 1 time

SNES audio channels fix/enhancement

Unread post by ioev »

I was playing some LTTP and Megaman X yesterday in celebration of the SNES 30th Anniversary, and was really noticing that "thing" where in many games when sound effects play it causes some channels of the soundtrack to cut out. Secret of Mana was pretty bad for it, but it happens in enough games to make me think it's almost a feature/limitation of the SPC700. This made me think: could there be a way to mitigate it, via some sort of enhancement to the implementation of the SPC700? I'm thinking in a similar way of how NES emulatiors/core can draw more sprites per line than the original hardware, or the turbo mode in the SNES core.

Given I don't really understand much about the SPC700, this is all just theoretical, but I'm assuming it has a finite number of channels available (maybe 8?) and share them between the audio and sound effects, so in some cases when a sound effect is programmed to play, it could have to use a channel that was previously playing part of the soundtrack. The way the soundtrack seamlessly picks up after playing the sound effect, makes me think it's almost a feature of the SPC700, so I'm curious if there would be some way of say, when a new sound is programmed to play, somehow detecting if it's a one time thing, and then instead of taking up a channel, somehow creating a new one, or maybe merging the sound data into the channel that is already playing an audio track in real time.

Of course I realize it's very unlikely this could ever really work, so I won't be offended if everyone thinks this is a terrible and impossible idea.
Post Reply