Which cartridge based console has the best music?

[J T]

I still don't feel positive that the NES is subtractive synthesis. I think the defining feature of subtractive synthesis is that you have control of cutoff filters that shave off high frequencies (low pass) or that shave off low frequencies (high pass). There is also some control of resonance that works in tandem with that. The NES just doesn't have these features.

Any subtractive synth I have ever used also had two oscillators, which could either play two simultaneous waveforms or synch the two oscillators through some sort of cross modulation. The NES is super basic. You have only one oscillator per channel, and the waveforms are predefined as pulse, triangle, or noise. The only wave that can really alter its timbre is the pulse wave, which can adjust the duty cycles to preset values of .125, .25, .50 (perfect square wave), or .75 (sounds the same as .25). Even as such, the volume could only move between values of 0-15 instead of the typical MIDI values of 0-127. This greatly limited the dynamics of compositions. Even worse, the triangle wave channel (used mostly for bass lines) had no volume range. It was either off (0) or on (15).

If you want to get a better handle on all of this, here is a really cool video of the theme from The Legend of Zelda where the wave forms are put in visual form like a spectrograph. The top two quadrants of the screen are the pulse waves, and they represent the melody. The bottom left is the triangle wave channel, and represents the bassline. The bottom right quadrant is the white noise channel. This represents the snare drum. White noise is a large randomized set of frequencies and sounds like TV static. If you play it in short punctuated bursts, it sounds a bit like snare drum. Remember that when looking at a graph like this, the height of the waves is the amplitude (i.e. volume) of the sound. The width of the waves is the frequency or pitch of the sound. When you squeeze the waveforms tight together like an accordian, the notes get higher pitched, when they are pulled farther apart, they sound lower.

The NES also has a 5th channel for playing low quality samples, but this was seldom used because it took up too much memory on the cart. This is how games use vocals, like in Skate or Die 2. The sampler is sometimes used for instruments too, like in the basslines for Journey to Silius or the tom drums in Super Mario 3.

[Tanooki]

If you want some clean voice sample choices from NES try this clip from start to around 1:40 into it.


Blades of Steel (Konami, 1988)
The Adventures of Bayou Billy (Konami, 1989)
Gauntlet II (Tengen, 1990)
S.C.A.T. (Natsume, 1991)
High Speed (Rare, 1991)

Gauntlet II I'll probably always believe to have the most clean and diverse set of recorded voices pulled straight from the arcade game and it's crazy. 1.05 in it will say 'Welcome Red Warrior' for stage 1, but it has them all -- wizard shot the food, valkyrie now as reflective shot, elf is now repulsive --(kill dragon) I have not seen such bravery! ...all in there. You can hear how samples do vary a lot on the system depending how much space someone wanted to consume on the chip as it could be clean or fuzzy/scratchy kind of like the audio sacrifices done in the first year on GBA games being noticeable.