Background on Street Fighter 2

[Keranu]

Hey, NEC Avenue, care to give me your jewel case (instructions too?) of SFII' since I only have a loose HuCard of the game ?

By the way, in the page Steve posted, that proto six button pad seems to have a hole in the center of the d-pad, probably to connect a little joystick to, that would have been nice.

[Kaminari]

Mmm, what exactly do you mean by sampled music tracks? I'm under the feeling you're talking about Amiga-like sampled loops. The only HuCard game (TurboChip actually) which uses this technic is Champions Forever Boxing.

SF2 Dash's soundtrack is your usual blend of PSG channels and sample-based drums/instruments, which is a technic used very often in HuCard games (more than people would believe or remember) since 1988 -- Batman, PC Denjin, Gunhed, Jackie Chan, 1943, Gradius, Salamander and a hundred more or so. Technically speaking, the sound output of the PCE is closer to a SCC chip than to a Famicom.

PC Engine Programmable Sound Generator by Paul Clifford

The PSG provides 6 sound channels, which can be conveniently paired according to the functionality they provide:

0-1
Waveform playback
Frequency modulation (channel 1 muted)

2-3
Waveform playback only

4-5
Waveform playback
White noise generation

Waveform playback is the most common and allows a 32 byte, 5 bit unsigned linear sample to be played back at selected frequencies.  Frequency modulation takes this one step further, allowing the playback frequency to be dynamically adjusted according to a specified pattern.  White noise is used to simulate percussion instruments and effects such as explosions, by means of a pseudo random square wave.

Alternatively, each channel can be individually switched to "Direct D/A" mode whereby the programmer can send data directly to the sound mixer, allowing more complex sound patterns to be generated, such as speech.  Inevitably this requires more programming effort and CPU time.

[Keranu]

Thanks for the usefull information once again, Kaminari. I learned some more new things!

[NEC Avenue]

Mmm, what exactly do you mean by sampled music tracks? I'm under the feeling you're talking about Amiga-like sampled loops. The only HuCard game (TurboChip actually) which uses this technic is Champions Forever Boxing.

SF2 Dash's soundtrack is your usual blend of PSG channels and sample-based drums/instruments, which is a technic used very often in HuCard games (more than people would believe or remember) since 1988 -- Batman, PC Denjin, Gunhed, Jackie Chan, 1943, Gradius, Salamander and a hundred more or so. Technically speaking, the sound output of the PCE is closer to a SCC chip than to a Famicom.

What I mean by sampled music is basically actually sampling a CD music track for example at a low resolution and sampling frequency. For example 4-bit 4kHz mono. You can try this yourself by taking a short loop of a 16-bit 44.1kHz stereo WAV file and convertin it to 4-bit 4kHz mono file.

Hey, NEC Avenue, care to give me your jewel case (instructions too?) of SFII' since I only have a loose HuCard of the game ?

By the way, in the page Steve posted, that proto six button pad seems to have a hole in the center of the d-pad, probably to connect a little joystick to, that would have been nice.

Are you serious? I could send it to you, but you'd better not sell it.

Anyway yeah that metal screw piece on the pad was probably for a screw on thumbstick.

[soco]

What I mean by sampled music is basically actually sampling a CD music track for example at a low resolution and sampling frequency. For example 4-bit 4kHz mono. You can try this yourself by taking a short loop of a 16-bit 44.1kHz stereo WAV file and convertin it to 4-bit 4kHz mono file.

yeah the resolution is only 5bit and probably around 3-7Khz or so.

the problem with it is that although it supported reasonably small samples with no extra CPU useage (32byte samples) most games threw in the standard FM wave structures like the sawtooth and sine waves. i have heard a few more games though that have sampled sound.  batman comes to mind.

[nodtveidt]

Hmm..that's pretty strange because synching would've been trivial since all you'd be doing is playing a music track for the duration of the stage. At the end of each round you'd just fade the music out and start the track from the beginning again.

Makes sense to me, but I'm just repeating the official statement NEC gave for the reason why this wasn't done. It was in a game magazine back in the day...probably EGM.

[Keranu]

Are you serious? I could send it to you, but you'd better not sell it.

Of course I'm serious and I won't sell it because I need it! If you have an extra working 6-button controller, I'll pay for that because my Avenue 6 Pad isn't working due to the pins being bent. I bent the pins in their right spots, but I still can't get it to work, probably because the metal on the connector of the cable is all bent and stuff, even though I can still manage to fit it into the system/tap.

[Black Tiger]

Well, I thought you folks might dig this blast from the past...

SFII ' released in June '93 from DuoWorld #1. Dig that prototype of the 6-button controllerr!

Thats a cool pic of the prototype 6 button pad.

[Zerojean]

In fact the giant Hu Card is just a piece of plastic on SF2, you can take it off to reveal an extended back rom panel underneath, it plays fine without this raised plastic bit.

Looks cool tho hehe.

[Keranu]

Whenever I pick up the SFII' HuCard, it feels like I could easily rip that part off. I don't want to do it though even though it must look cool! Anyone have pictures of it?