The originals sound better. The aliasing provides a crunchiness and sharpness to the final output that drives emotional energy. That zero mission rhythm isn't intended to sound smooth and soft, the driving hard beats are an emotional tool for eliciting anxiety and anticipation from the player.
But this is a bit like those who use smoothing filters. It's ultimately about taste, but it should be recognized that unless the filter is attempting to accurately recreate the original hardware of the era then the original design intent is not being adhered to, and so something may be lost in the "enhancement".
This is fair, I should have made it clearer that this is all subjective. For what it's worth I have all of this disabled by default in my own emulator because I think default settings should always err towards accuracy when that's a question.
I personally do prefer the interpolated versions in most cases because to me the extra high-frequency information just sounds like noise that makes it harder for my brain to process the underlying music. But clearly many feel differently!
A friend had this killer basement setup with a projector into a huge canvas dropsheet. Plus the game cube, and the GBA dock for it, so we were projecting those games meant for a 2 inch screen maybe 10-15 feet wide.
It's really close for me. I listened to the accurate version, then the enhanced one, and my first thought was "oh, yeah, this sounds better."
Then I listened to the accurate version again, and thought "wait, never mind, this one sounds better."
After going back and forth a few times, I think I still agree the original/accurate one is better, but it's pretty close. I really encourage people to listen for themselves.
For what it's worth, I have little to no personal nostalgia for the Game Boy Advance.
> The originals sound better. The aliasing provides a crunchiness and sharpness to the final output that drives emotional energy.
In the mid-1980s the first really affordable sampler was the Ensoniq Mirage, which used the Bob Yannes-designed ES5503 DOC (Digital Oscillator Chip) to generate its waveforms. It played back 8-bit samples and used a fairly simple phase accumulator that didn't do any form of interpolation (I don't count "leftmost neighbour" as interpolation). Particularly when you pitch it down, you get a rough, clanky, gritty "whine" to samples, that the analogue filters didn't necessarily do a lot to remove.
Later on they released the EPS which had 13-bit sampling. Why 13-bit? I don't know, I guess because the Emulator I and II used 8-bit samples but μ-law coding, giving effectively 13-bit equivalent resolution. It also used linear interpolation to smooth the "jumps" between samples, and even if you loaded in and converted a Mirage disk the "graininess" when you pitched things down was gone.
I'm currently writing some code to play back Mirage samples from disk images, and I've actually added a linear interpolator to it. Some things sound better with it, some things sound worse. I think I'll make it a front panel control, so you can turn it on and off as you want.
I'll just throw some more ES5503 DOC love here. It's also the audio chip in the Apple IIGS. In 1986, having a stock home computer playing 32 simultaneous hardware voices (without software mixing), each with hardware pan ... was remarkable. Otherwise you were stuck with 3 or maybe 4 hardware voices. e.g. the timbre and filter of the C64 SID chip was gorgeous (another Bob Yannes design), but 3 voices was all you got. And just 3 square waves and noise on the Ataris of the era. Chords or complex harmony? Fire up the arpeggiators! Lol.
When I browse the demoscene I'm always a bit surprised there's not much Apple IIGS content. Graphically, it was stunted, but the ES5503 DOC was a pro synth engine right there next to the 6502 ... yowza.
I don't think so, I think you're just getting a high end that isn't in the original audio. In the places where there are high frequencies the aliasing and the hiss just gets in the way.
>I don't think so, I think you're just getting a high end that isn't in the original audio. In the places where there are high frequencies the aliasing and the hiss just gets in the way.
I don't get this, are you saying that this aliasing is just an artifact of the emulation? Like the GBA speaker/headphone jack itself would also be affected by the same aliasing right? And in that case the song was composed for that, right?
I don't think it would be right to go as far as to say that there's a huge strong interplay in every single GBA title's song with the hardware (I'm sure some stuff was phoned in and only listened to by the composer in whatever MIDI DAW thing they were using) but at one point the GBA was the target right?
The artifacts weren't a conscious design decision, they were a constraint. We don't know whether the designers would have chosen to keep them or not, if they had the choice.
The idea that sound designers on old games were totally siloed and ignorant of how their compositions would sound on final consumer hardware is completely wrong. Most of these composers were programmers themselves and knew exactly how to get the final hardware to make the sounds they wanted, even when they composed using more advanced tech.
Programmers using devkits (more powerful than the consumer hardware) likewise.
I don't understand what you mean. Nobody said they didn't know how their compositions would sound, my argument is that at least some of these composers would have chosen the more advanced interpolation method, if it were available.
This is great stuff… basically, an easy way to get much higher quality audio out of a GBA emulator.
I’ll add some context here—why don’t more games run their audio at 32768 Hz, if that’s such a natural rate to run audio? The answer lies in how you fill the buffers. In any modern, sensible audio system, you can check how much space is available in the audio buffer and simply fill it. The GBA lacks a mechanism to query this. Instead, what you do is calculate this yourself, and figure out when to trigger additional audio DMA from the VBlank interrupt. You know the VBlank runs every 280896 cycles, and you know that the processor runs at 16777216 Hz, so you can do some math to calculate how much data is remaining in the audio DMA stream.
A lot of games simplify the math—it’s easier to start a new audio DMA in your VBlank handler, but that means running at a lower sample rate, which will sound pretty crispy.
YMMV, some people like the crispy aliased audio. If the audio weren’t crispy, the sound designers probably would have adjusted the samples to compensate. Other factors being equal, I’d rather listen to what the original artists heard when they were testing on real hardware, because that is probably closer to what they intended, even though it has a lot of artifacts in it.
> why don’t more games run their audio at 32768 Hz, if that’s such a natural rate to run audio?
I've written some code to play back 8-bit samples (and indeed to wavetable, FM, and VA synthesis) on 8-bit Arduinos using the PWM to output 8-bit audio. That runs at 31373Hz which is a pretty crazy sample rate.
Why?
Because the chip is clocked at 16MHz, and if you program the PWM for no prescaler and "phase correct" PWM where it counts up and back down, so you get a widening pulse in the middle of a "burst", then it counts 510 "steps" of the counter. It's an 8-bit counter so it counts from 0 to 255, then the next step counts back down to 254, and so to 0 again, when the next step takes it to 1.
I'm not well-versed in the terms, so I'm not sure which part is the so-called "audio aliasing."
To me, the original has very obvious background noise which the enhanced version removes. But as the author has said, the enhanced version sounds "muffled" (and, IMHO, not just a little), which probably makes most people (including me) feel it sounds worse.
Also, shouldn't most of music be included in the game's official OST? I assume that version would not be limited by the game media's technical limitation at the time and should represent the artistically intended version best.
Edit: apparently in this very case, "Metroid: Zero Mission" doesn't seem to have any official OST release. Unfortunate.
The crispy aliasing of the audio has always felt cozy to me. It’s also a bit of a signature of the system, like the wobbly polygons on PS1. I appreciate that there are ways to change the sound, but it feels a bit rude to label it broken or defective.
I strongly disagree here. I was so hyped for the GBA that I bought it on release day, only to be disappointed later. One of reasons is the lackluster sound; seriously, Nintendo had already built an impressive sound system for the SNES, and then the GBA just had a software-driven DAC? Why did the cheapened out so much?
Same as for the PS1, I always found the wobbly polygons and warping textures painful to watch.
Sony made the SNES sound chip, and the GBA was power-constrained by AA batteries. Those are the two biggest reasons I can think of just off the top of my head.
If you combine "GBA Mus Ripper" and "SoundFont MIDI Player", you can get some seriously excellent sound for listening to GBA music.
"GBA Mus Ripper" detects the so-called "Sappy" music driver and extracts and converts the songs to MIDI files, and generates a SF2 soundbank file. Available at https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/881/
"SoundFont MIDI Player" plays back MIDI files. You can configure it to automatically load a SF2 soundbank file in the directory. When you load a converted GBA MIDI file, you get the high music quality of a modern feature-packed MIDI playback engine. Available at https://falcosoft.hu/softwares.html#midiplayer
It's not perfect though, as GBA games do not use true standard MIDIs. Some MIDI controller commands (like modulator wheel) don't translate correctly.
The reason the nearest neighbour interpolation can sound better is that the aliasing fills the higher frequencies of the audio with a mirror image of the lower frequencies. While humans are less sensitive to higher frequencies, you still expect them to be there, so some people prefer the "fake" detail from aliasing to them just been outright missing in a more accurate sample interpolation.
It's actually the other way round: Aliasing fills the lower frequencies with a mirror image of the higher frequencies. So where do the higher frequencies come from? From the upsampling that happens before the aliasing. _That_ makes the higher frequencies contain (non-mirrored!) copies of the lower frequencies. :-)
I suspect that without nostalgia, the fixed interpolation would absolutely sound better. Unfortunately, nostalgia. The lesson I'm taking away here is that, oh, the terrible resamplings are the aspect of faithful emulation that makes it sound like a GameBoy and not just sawtooths.
I don't quite understand why the author is doing special handling for PSG versus PCM audio.
My GameBoy emulator generates one "audio sample" per clock tick (which is ~1 mhz, so massive 'oversampling'), decimates that signal down to like 100 ksample/sec, then uses a low-pass biquad filter or two to go down to 16 bit / 48 khz and remove beyond-Nyquist frequencies. Doesn't have any of the "muffling" properties this guy is seeing, aside from those literally caused by the low-pass.
Audio was the thing I could never figure out on my Gameboy emulator. I couldn’t get it to pass basic tests, even without bothering to output sound on the computer.
The loss in high-frequency information is not worth the interpolation. Bass loses its crunch. Percussion fades into the background.
Besides, I personally prefer to play my vgm at the original sample rate, and my soundcard adjusts to the correct rate for each song through fb2k plugins.
>what if, instead of accurately emulating how the GBA PWM hardware works, the emulator uses its own interpolation algorithm to resample from audio channels’ sample rates directly to the emulator’s audio output sample rate?
Then it would be less accurate to the actual console, and thus a worse emulator.
The originals sound better. The aliasing provides a crunchiness and sharpness to the final output that drives emotional energy. That zero mission rhythm isn't intended to sound smooth and soft, the driving hard beats are an emotional tool for eliciting anxiety and anticipation from the player.
But this is a bit like those who use smoothing filters. It's ultimately about taste, but it should be recognized that unless the filter is attempting to accurately recreate the original hardware of the era then the original design intent is not being adhered to, and so something may be lost in the "enhancement".
This is fair, I should have made it clearer that this is all subjective. For what it's worth I have all of this disabled by default in my own emulator because I think default settings should always err towards accuracy when that's a question.
I personally do prefer the interpolated versions in most cases because to me the extra high-frequency information just sounds like noise that makes it harder for my brain to process the underlying music. But clearly many feel differently!
A friend had this killer basement setup with a projector into a huge canvas dropsheet. Plus the game cube, and the GBA dock for it, so we were projecting those games meant for a 2 inch screen maybe 10-15 feet wide.
Imagining how sharp and crisp those pixels must have been at that size... Oh man.
If it wasn't so late I'd calculate how big (in inches) an individual pixel is at that size.
It's really close for me. I listened to the accurate version, then the enhanced one, and my first thought was "oh, yeah, this sounds better."
Then I listened to the accurate version again, and thought "wait, never mind, this one sounds better."
After going back and forth a few times, I think I still agree the original/accurate one is better, but it's pretty close. I really encourage people to listen for themselves.
For what it's worth, I have little to no personal nostalgia for the Game Boy Advance.
> The originals sound better. The aliasing provides a crunchiness and sharpness to the final output that drives emotional energy.
In the mid-1980s the first really affordable sampler was the Ensoniq Mirage, which used the Bob Yannes-designed ES5503 DOC (Digital Oscillator Chip) to generate its waveforms. It played back 8-bit samples and used a fairly simple phase accumulator that didn't do any form of interpolation (I don't count "leftmost neighbour" as interpolation). Particularly when you pitch it down, you get a rough, clanky, gritty "whine" to samples, that the analogue filters didn't necessarily do a lot to remove.
Later on they released the EPS which had 13-bit sampling. Why 13-bit? I don't know, I guess because the Emulator I and II used 8-bit samples but μ-law coding, giving effectively 13-bit equivalent resolution. It also used linear interpolation to smooth the "jumps" between samples, and even if you loaded in and converted a Mirage disk the "graininess" when you pitched things down was gone.
I'm currently writing some code to play back Mirage samples from disk images, and I've actually added a linear interpolator to it. Some things sound better with it, some things sound worse. I think I'll make it a front panel control, so you can turn it on and off as you want.
I'll just throw some more ES5503 DOC love here. It's also the audio chip in the Apple IIGS. In 1986, having a stock home computer playing 32 simultaneous hardware voices (without software mixing), each with hardware pan ... was remarkable. Otherwise you were stuck with 3 or maybe 4 hardware voices. e.g. the timbre and filter of the C64 SID chip was gorgeous (another Bob Yannes design), but 3 voices was all you got. And just 3 square waves and noise on the Ataris of the era. Chords or complex harmony? Fire up the arpeggiators! Lol.
When I browse the demoscene I'm always a bit surprised there's not much Apple IIGS content. Graphically, it was stunted, but the ES5503 DOC was a pro synth engine right there next to the 6502 ... yowza.
Yeah this is a neat experiment, but the ‘cleaned up’ versions sound ‘wrong’ to my ears - that high whistle/hiss is ‘missing.’
The originals sound better.
I don't think so, I think you're just getting a high end that isn't in the original audio. In the places where there are high frequencies the aliasing and the hiss just gets in the way.
that drives emotional energy
Seems like a hyperbolic rationalization.
>I don't think so, I think you're just getting a high end that isn't in the original audio. In the places where there are high frequencies the aliasing and the hiss just gets in the way.
I don't get this, are you saying that this aliasing is just an artifact of the emulation? Like the GBA speaker/headphone jack itself would also be affected by the same aliasing right? And in that case the song was composed for that, right?
I don't think it would be right to go as far as to say that there's a huge strong interplay in every single GBA title's song with the hardware (I'm sure some stuff was phoned in and only listened to by the composer in whatever MIDI DAW thing they were using) but at one point the GBA was the target right?
The ‘improved’ versions sound muffled like I have water in my ears. Plus I’d rather hear the game as it was designed, artefacts and all.
The artifacts weren't a conscious design decision, they were a constraint. We don't know whether the designers would have chosen to keep them or not, if they had the choice.
GBA games were made for a console that behaved like this.
Accuracy is paramount. Targeting else than the console's sound is an affront to preservation.
Preservation and design intent are two very different things.
The idea that sound designers on old games were totally siloed and ignorant of how their compositions would sound on final consumer hardware is completely wrong. Most of these composers were programmers themselves and knew exactly how to get the final hardware to make the sounds they wanted, even when they composed using more advanced tech.
Programmers using devkits (more powerful than the consumer hardware) likewise.
I don't understand what you mean. Nobody said they didn't know how their compositions would sound, my argument is that at least some of these composers would have chosen the more advanced interpolation method, if it were available.
sure, and you know what their design intent was right?
This is great stuff… basically, an easy way to get much higher quality audio out of a GBA emulator.
I’ll add some context here—why don’t more games run their audio at 32768 Hz, if that’s such a natural rate to run audio? The answer lies in how you fill the buffers. In any modern, sensible audio system, you can check how much space is available in the audio buffer and simply fill it. The GBA lacks a mechanism to query this. Instead, what you do is calculate this yourself, and figure out when to trigger additional audio DMA from the VBlank interrupt. You know the VBlank runs every 280896 cycles, and you know that the processor runs at 16777216 Hz, so you can do some math to calculate how much data is remaining in the audio DMA stream.
A lot of games simplify the math—it’s easier to start a new audio DMA in your VBlank handler, but that means running at a lower sample rate, which will sound pretty crispy.
YMMV, some people like the crispy aliased audio. If the audio weren’t crispy, the sound designers probably would have adjusted the samples to compensate. Other factors being equal, I’d rather listen to what the original artists heard when they were testing on real hardware, because that is probably closer to what they intended, even though it has a lot of artifacts in it.
> why don’t more games run their audio at 32768 Hz, if that’s such a natural rate to run audio?
I've written some code to play back 8-bit samples (and indeed to wavetable, FM, and VA synthesis) on 8-bit Arduinos using the PWM to output 8-bit audio. That runs at 31373Hz which is a pretty crazy sample rate.
Why?
Because the chip is clocked at 16MHz, and if you program the PWM for no prescaler and "phase correct" PWM where it counts up and back down, so you get a widening pulse in the middle of a "burst", then it counts 510 "steps" of the counter. It's an 8-bit counter so it counts from 0 to 255, then the next step counts back down to 254, and so to 0 again, when the next step takes it to 1.
And 16000000/510 is 31372.55 ;-)
I'm not well-versed in the terms, so I'm not sure which part is the so-called "audio aliasing."
To me, the original has very obvious background noise which the enhanced version removes. But as the author has said, the enhanced version sounds "muffled" (and, IMHO, not just a little), which probably makes most people (including me) feel it sounds worse.
Also, shouldn't most of music be included in the game's official OST? I assume that version would not be limited by the game media's technical limitation at the time and should represent the artistically intended version best.
Edit: apparently in this very case, "Metroid: Zero Mission" doesn't seem to have any official OST release. Unfortunate.
The crispy aliasing of the audio has always felt cozy to me. It’s also a bit of a signature of the system, like the wobbly polygons on PS1. I appreciate that there are ways to change the sound, but it feels a bit rude to label it broken or defective.
I strongly disagree here. I was so hyped for the GBA that I bought it on release day, only to be disappointed later. One of reasons is the lackluster sound; seriously, Nintendo had already built an impressive sound system for the SNES, and then the GBA just had a software-driven DAC? Why did the cheapened out so much?
Same as for the PS1, I always found the wobbly polygons and warping textures painful to watch.
Sony made the SNES sound chip, and the GBA was power-constrained by AA batteries. Those are the two biggest reasons I can think of just off the top of my head.
If you combine "GBA Mus Ripper" and "SoundFont MIDI Player", you can get some seriously excellent sound for listening to GBA music.
"GBA Mus Ripper" detects the so-called "Sappy" music driver and extracts and converts the songs to MIDI files, and generates a SF2 soundbank file. Available at https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/881/
"SoundFont MIDI Player" plays back MIDI files. You can configure it to automatically load a SF2 soundbank file in the directory. When you load a converted GBA MIDI file, you get the high music quality of a modern feature-packed MIDI playback engine. Available at https://falcosoft.hu/softwares.html#midiplayer
It's not perfect though, as GBA games do not use true standard MIDIs. Some MIDI controller commands (like modulator wheel) don't translate correctly.
The reason the nearest neighbour interpolation can sound better is that the aliasing fills the higher frequencies of the audio with a mirror image of the lower frequencies. While humans are less sensitive to higher frequencies, you still expect them to be there, so some people prefer the "fake" detail from aliasing to them just been outright missing in a more accurate sample interpolation.
It's basically doing an accidental and low-quality form of spectral band replication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_band_replication which is used in modern codecs.
It's actually the other way round: Aliasing fills the lower frequencies with a mirror image of the higher frequencies. So where do the higher frequencies come from? From the upsampling that happens before the aliasing. _That_ makes the higher frequencies contain (non-mirrored!) copies of the lower frequencies. :-)
Oh yes you're correct, imaging would be the correct term for what's happening I think (aliasing is high -> low and imaging is low -> high)?
I suspect that without nostalgia, the fixed interpolation would absolutely sound better. Unfortunately, nostalgia. The lesson I'm taking away here is that, oh, the terrible resamplings are the aspect of faithful emulation that makes it sound like a GameBoy and not just sawtooths.
I don't quite understand why the author is doing special handling for PSG versus PCM audio.
My GameBoy emulator generates one "audio sample" per clock tick (which is ~1 mhz, so massive 'oversampling'), decimates that signal down to like 100 ksample/sec, then uses a low-pass biquad filter or two to go down to 16 bit / 48 khz and remove beyond-Nyquist frequencies. Doesn't have any of the "muffling" properties this guy is seeing, aside from those literally caused by the low-pass.
The original sounds so much better...
"Much cleaner! The second recording does sound a little more muffled, but I’ll take that over the horrible audio aliasing in the first recording."
I absolutely wouldn't. To my ears the second version sounds much worse. Personal opinion etc etc, but wow, it's very very clear to my ears.
Impressive.
Audio was the thing I could never figure out on my Gameboy emulator. I couldn’t get it to pass basic tests, even without bothering to output sound on the computer.
The loss in high-frequency information is not worth the interpolation. Bass loses its crunch. Percussion fades into the background.
Besides, I personally prefer to play my vgm at the original sample rate, and my soundcard adjusts to the correct rate for each song through fb2k plugins.
>what if, instead of accurately emulating how the GBA PWM hardware works, the emulator uses its own interpolation algorithm to resample from audio channels’ sample rates directly to the emulator’s audio output sample rate?
Then it would be less accurate to the actual console, and thus a worse emulator.