The SNES gave composers several amazing things to work with: sample playback, 8 channel polyphony,
built-in delay…
… but it complicated everything by only having 64 kilobytes of audio memory, which had to be shared
with samples, sound effects, delay buffer, and the music driver.
You’ve heard this already, it’s in my Sound Capabilities of the SNES video.
But I’d like to talk about a funny way that composers dealt with their limited SNES memory.
So, hip-hop is a nice and minimal genre, right?
You just need breaks, some bass, maybe some chords.
Loop and variation and done.
This is the approach Michel Winogradoff took for Rap Jam.
The result is phenomenal.
[song: Michel Winogradoff - Entering Chicago Tournament]
The downsampling required to shove a full bar of drums into the SNES resulted in
a lofi sound that perfectly complements the style.
But at what cost?
This break took up 21 of the 64 available kilobytes in the SPC-700.
All this for barely over 2 seconds of audio.
[audio: one bar of drums]
But then there’s Jonathan Dunn, who decided to squeeze down 7 seconds of bossa music into
a single 32 kilobyte sample,
eating half the memory and all of the sound quality.
[song: Jonathan Dunn - Elevator Music 1]
Going to this length for a short elevator tune is a pretty funny gag, admittedly.
You can do better, though.
This elevator song, for example, could have been broken down further.
These piano chords could have been chopped down and repeated,
[song: Jonathan Dunn - Elevator Music 1]
with the drum sequenced in channel 2 and bassline in channel 3.
It might lose a bit of humanization, but it’d save a ton of space.
This is the approach that Chris Granner and Kev Bruce took for “Revolution X”.
They found every part that loops in the arcade version and cut that down, and reassembled it
in the SNES version.
[song: Chris Granner, Kev Bruce - Inside Club X]
The result is still a ton of muffled samples, but they add up to a much more complete song.
It’s kind of telling that the shorter the song is, the higher the sample rate,
but that’s the nature of the limitations.
[song: Chris Granner, Kev Bruce - Secret Concert Room]
[song: Chris Granner, Kev Bruce - NON Helicopter Pursuit]
What’s more interesting is that this technique hasn’t died.
Listen to this song by Oneohtrix Point Never, titled “Sleep Dealer”.
[song: Oneohtrix Point Never - Sleep Dealer]
It makes heavy usage of samples and repetition to create this hazy vibe.
It’s a beautiful song in a genre that emerged long after the SNES’s lifespan.
But here’s the thing: it can be recreated on the SNES.
In fact, the sample you just heard was the SNES recreation.
Here’s the original.
[song: Oneohtrix Point Never - Sleep Dealer]
There are differences, but they’re subtle to an extent that
Youtube’s copyright algorithm can’t tell them apart.
Wyatt ported this song and several others to the SNES in 2020 for his romhack,
bringing us up to [essentially] today.
That’s the entire sample chopping lineage I wanted to show off, but there’s a funny
fact that I can’t NOT mention.
Check out the channel playback on Rap Jam.
[song: Michel Winogradoff - Entering Chicago Tournament]
That. Did you see that jump?
Yeah.
This game uses minimalistic bar-long samples and STILL features dynamic sample allocation.
The bane.
Anyway, that’s all for this video.
If you’d like to explore some SNES flavored bossa-nova-ish lounge business productivity
music, I’ve just finished two mixes of the stuff, neither of which feature this muffled bossa song.
Check them out here, subscribe if you like that sort of thing, and I’ll see you next mix.
[song: Jonathan Dunn - Elevator Music 1]