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Other Sega sound engines

Technical discussion which is not directly related to VGM files. Talk about Hardware and Software.

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  • drdevil Offline
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Other Sega sound engines

Post by drdevil »

Does anyone know the names of some of Sega's arcade sound engines? Or were Sega using a variant of SMPS right from the beginning? I'd like to know, just for curiosity.
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Post by ctr »

The names of the vast majority of Sega's sound drivers are unknown. We don't even know where the name of SMPS really came from...

The sound driver used in Hang On, Enduro Racer and Out Run appear to have been written by Hiroshi Kawaguchi himself. It does seem to share some code similarities with SMPS, including memory structures. This driver was probably used on Sega X/Y board games too.

Starting in 1992 Sega used a MIDI-based driver for their later System 32 games. This would later be modified for the MultiPCM chip and used in System 32 Multi and Model 1/2 games. It's unknown exactly who wrote this sound driver.

Other arcade drivers used by Sega have not been researched yet so not much is known about those apart from the occasional sound programmer credit in some games.

The SMPS driver was initially programmed by Tokuhiko Uwabo and is derived from the sound drivers used in the Master System BIOS and other first-party Master System games. It was later forked into a few branches, maintained by different sound programmers. Those branches did sometimes exchange code with each other, so it's not perfectly hierarchical.
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Post by ValleyBell »

Sega System C/C-2 games use a variant of SMPS 68k. (I disassembled Sonic Patrol Car a while back - it does a few things like pitch bends differently from MegaDrive SMPS though.)
New UFO Catcher uses SMPS Z80.

It should be safe to assume that almost every Sega arcade game from that time uses a variant of SMPS.


The sound driver from Out Run is also used in Space Harrier and Turbo OutRun.
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Post by drdevil »

Interesting info, guys.
ValleyBell wrote:Sega System C/C-2 games use a variant of SMPS 68k. (I disassembled Sonic Patrol Car a while back - it does a few things like pitch bends differently from MegaDrive SMPS though.
Would it still be theoretically possible to port System C music to MD SMPS, even with its differences?
ValleyBell wrote:The sound driver from Out Run is also used in Space Harrier and Turbo OutRun.
Wouldn't those games use slightly different variants of the driver? Space Harrier uses the YM2203 (I don't get why, though) unlike other Sega arcade games and Turbo OutRun has more advanced use of PCM samples.
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Post by ValleyBell »

drdevil wrote:
ValleyBell wrote:Sega System C/C-2 games use a variant of SMPS 68k. (I disassembled Sonic Patrol Car a while back - it does a few things like pitch bends differently from MegaDrive SMPS though.
Would it still be theoretically possible to port System C music to MD SMPS, even with its differences?
Yes. It shouldn't be too hard either.
drdevil wrote:
ValleyBell wrote:The sound driver from Out Run is also used in Space Harrier and Turbo OutRun.
Wouldn't those games use slightly different variants of the driver? Space Harrier uses the YM2203 (I don't get why, though) unlike other Sega arcade games and Turbo OutRun has more advanced use of PCM samples.
Yes, it's slightly different variants due to YM2203 vs. YM2151, but the sequence format should be mostly compatible. (It's been a while since I looked at those drivers, though.)
The used PCM samples shouldn't make a difference.
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