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Comment by frou_dh | Hacker News Reader

Impressive audio. Back at the time, it struck me that the MegaDrive/Genesis had a real "harshness" to both its colour pallette and audio when compared to the SNES. Both had lots of great games of course.

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I'd actually love to see this done on a Genesis. The Genesis had an FM Synthesizer in it's sound chip, made by Yamaha.

The Super Nintendo has a distinctive and pleasant sound that I like, but only outputs a 32khz signal.

I really like projects like these using old sound chips as instruments.

I agree, I love FM and will always think good FM or "real chiptunes" are more impressive than good sample-based synthesis, because you can't just lean on your sample library. There are a few Genesis trackers out there, including Deflemask[1], vgmmaker (which sadly, the author took down because he got tired of dealing with unappreciative jerks, so you'll have to Google a bit to find a copy), and YMDj [2] (a "native tracker" that runs on the Genesis itself)

[1] http://www.delek.com.ar/deflemask

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTDiPqkoFnc

A little over a year ago, Titan released a demo for the Genesis called Overdrive, and, well, it's fucking amazing, go watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQqJm14sHRY

There's actually a great VSTi based on the Genesis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdlj8Vjof6c

If you're into FM synthesis in general, the Android/iPhone app Caustic has a fantastic FM synth (there's free Windows and OS X versions of it as well).

The SNES was definitely more sophisticated than the Genesis in terms of video - total color palette is 32678 colors vs 512. Makes sense as it was released 2 years later.

It was released two years later, but all the upgrades were to more peripheral features like the palette and various special effects. They're both chewing through the same amount of memory each raster to draw the screen, which is the core of what each hardware system is designed around.

It's an interesting contrast with NEC's Supergrafx system, an obscure upgrade to their better-known Turbografx-16, which was released some months prior to the SNES and was a much greater advance in terms of raw power. It uses two separate graphics chips which simultaneously read graphics data from separate banks of RAM, which allows a lot more to be displayed. It has twice the sprites, twice the graphics RAM, and can use up to twice the resolution as the SNES. However, it's not as "well-rounded" a system as the SNES and is simpler in various ways. Unfortunately the 5 or so games that were released for it didn't push the hardware much, so you won't be able to see much evidence of its prodigious capabilities, but they're there.

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