FM music or PSG music?

[Arkhan]

If you don't mean SMS, why did you post a link to the SMS R-Type FM soundtrack? 

I only did that since I couldn't find a youtube video with home console FM for r-type other than that one.  It serves enough of the purpose to compare the two

FM has the technical edge, for sure, but more classic games on classic systems (NES, PCE, SMS, GB, MSX, C64...) use PSG, so I gotta love 'em!

The thing about MSX that is so nice is it gets everything.  Its got a PSG, AMAZING FM music (MicroCabin games), AND the Konami SCC which is more or less the PCE with a little more oomph.  The waveform values are 8bit instead of 5bit.   Some stuff utilizes all of it at once.  It is pretty much the best thing you could ever hear.


and C64 isn't really a bleepity bloop PSG so much as it is an actual analog synth chip.  The thing stands in a league of its own..... I mean its the only sound chip of the 8bit era that sounds just like a Roland synth.   Its just a shame it only has one volume register so some games the music is nice, and then you shoot your guns and the sfx for the weaponry overtakes the music and makes a mess.

and as was mentioned, the frigging arps.  So much arp abuse. It was nice the first 3 or 4 times I heard an arpy song.   After the 9023472034th one, its just a sick joke!

I used SIDs for the CD music for Insanity. :-D  Theyre the best thing to come out of the C64

FM has this warmness which i miss in PSG.

 Yeah, but it can really suffer from the generic "twang"..over usage. Some tunes I prefer in FM, some in PCE PSG. But I know what you mean. I love the love the warm base type sounds from FM. The CD unit should have added a generic FM chip for those low/warm base tones.

 When it comes to R-Type, the PCE chiptunes are better than the Arcade FM versions. There's no contest.

 And for the record, I think arcade FM is kinda lacking. It's thin and steely. I don't care for it. Especially Capcom's stuff. Arcade FM that's ported to the Genesis, almost always sounds warmer and better. It's just that Genesis FX are almost all FM and I'm not a fan of FM fx.

This actually reminds me of the RTYpe for x68000     the FM music sounds like a bunch of cellphones in a soupcan.


I cant decide what I like more.  I hear PCE stuff and go WOOO PCE

then I hear:


and go WOOO FM.   The Feares town theme is probably my favorite FM tune of all time.

[Digi.k]

love them both

but stuff like this i really DO Rike!..

populous intro

jackie chan gameplay vid..

[esteban]

I like both FM and PSG, however, when it came time to vote, I voted more truthfully: an overwhelming majority of my favorite compositions are PSG. 

The Feares town theme is probably my favorite FM tune of all time.

Feares Town is certainly a sweet track. Damn catchy and very yummy.

Preceding Feares is "Hurry Fray (Title)" which has an interesting synth lead (reminiscent of MotoRoader's, surprisingly!) + a  disco bassline.  There is something about this track I dig: it oscillates between lite bubblegum goof and something slightly more sophisticated.


 

[ccovell]

And surprisingly, the OPL chips in the MSX (and MKIII-FM) are a really inferior form of FM, different from the OPN chips used in the arcades and Genesis.

Micro Cabin got some great sounds out of it in Illusion City as well.

[Arkhan]

I like both FM and PSG, however, when it came time to vote, I voted more truthfully: an overwhelming majority of my favorite compositions are PSG. 

The Feares town theme is probably my favorite FM tune of all time.

Feares Town is certainly a sweet track. Damn catchy and very yummy.

Preceding Feares is "Hurry Fray (Title)" which has an interesting synth lead (reminiscent of MotoRoader's, surprisingly!) + a  disco bassline.  There is something about this track I dig: it oscillates between lite bubblegum goof and something slightly more sophisticated.


 

its very unfortunate that the soundtrack for Fray CD on PCE really isn't as good as the FM stuff from the MSX.

Id rather they just record the FM stuff to redbook and use that lol...

[Zeon]

Psg owns FM, period. Fm has some good tunes, but psg has far more good tunes. The best of fm doesn't compare to the very best of psg IMO. Not even close. There is WAY too much fm garbage music out there. For every Streets of Rage there are at least 300 crappy "tinny" and "abrasive" and overall crappy fm tunes. For however much psg owns fm, multiple the amount of ownage by at least 1,000,000,000,000, and precede ownage with words like super, mega, and hyper, and you have an idea how much psg owns redbook, especially early redbook.

Redbook is decent, but the instrumentation is worse, because in 99% of the cases, they have synthy instruments that are trying too hard to sound real, but falling very flat. Mostly sounds like uninspired midis on steroids. Instrumentation aside, lots of redbook is mundane, and bland. You can tell when they got lazy. Kaze no Xanadu may not be my favorite pc engine rpg or game by far, but I have to give them a MEGA thumbs up for making 99% of the game's sound track in psg, and very well done psg at that. The kick ass music was one of the few things that was able to keep me going for 6 hours straight without pulling my hair out trying to figure out what bastard I needed to talk to that I couldn't find, or wasting 10 minutes at a time traveling from one end of an area to another to see if I actually triggered an event.

I wished they still made most games with psg music, I'd probably buy some of the crap they shit out nowadays if they did. I would totally buy rock band or guitar hero, if it was all kick ass psg music.

OBEY PSG

DESTROY REDBOOK 

[Arkhan]

Im not sure I entirely follow your logic.  Guitar Hero isn't synthy computer instrumentation.... its real music lol.  I love PSG and all, but Van Halen sounds better when its Van Halen, not PSG Halen.

and out of curiosity what redbook stuff sounds like crappy MIDI to you?


another interesting point is, how many games were released in all for the PCE? Factor in the SMALL library of SCC games from Konami on MSX, and I think you might end up discovering that there are actually more FM games with good music than PSG ones.... 

[Zeon]

I never said guitar hero was synthy, but I can see how you inferred that.

I love PSG and all, but Van Halen sounds better when its Van Halen, not PSG Halen.

I disagree 

and out of curiosity what redbook stuff sounds like crappy MIDI to you?

Not necessarily crappy, but uninspired and flat, and all of it. People rave about the tg-16 redbook audio for ys 1& II, and ys III, yet I think it is passe, I actually prefer nes versions of the tunes, and am deeply disappointed that they didn't go psg. Even the genesis Ys III pwns tg-cd Ys III's redbook audio.

another interesting point is, how many games were released in all for the PCE? Factor in the SMALL library of SCC games from Konami on MSX, and I think you might end up discovering that there are actually more FM games with good music than PSG ones.... 

I would also include nes, and gameboy in the ranks of the psg chippy type music. There are quite a bit of good nes and gameboy tunes that don't use any expansion chips. Believe it or not many pce cd games had a good amount of psg music. If you took a good to bad ratio of fm vs psg music of just the genesis and pce alone (Tons of arcade games and others used fm, granted usually superior hardware). There are FAR more good psg tunes. In fact I can think of maybe 3 games on the pce that had awful psg music. Titan and Deep Blue are two of them, and even then none of them have ever been ear grating. There is literally about two handfuls of good fm genny music. I have listened to some msx fm music, and I can say the good stuff, pales in comparison the the good psg tunes.

[Arkhan]

well if you are factoring in NES and stuff you must not of read the original post all the way, lol.

[Zeon]

well if you are factoring in NES and stuff you must not of read the original post all the way, lol.

That negates the rest of my post how?:

If you took a good to bad ratio of fm vs psg music of just the genesis and pce alone (Tons of arcade games and others used fm, granted usually superior hardware). There are FAR more good psg tunes. In fact I can think of maybe 3 games on the pce that had awful psg music. Titan and Deep Blue are two of them, and even then none of them have ever been ear grating. There is literally about two handfuls of good fm genny music. I have listened to some msx fm music, and I can say the good stuff, pales in comparison the the good psg tunes.

I read your post 100%, and only mentioned the nes and gameboy (you didn't say anything about that one ) as a small aside. Actually, another system that was capable of some pretty cool, yet basic music was the intellivision, although very few commercial games took advantage of it due to size limitations and cost.

[Arkhan]

As far as PSG I really only do mean the 32 byte ones (PCE and SCC).  the other stuff (NES/Gameboy) is at a huge disadvantage from the start so it isn't fair to compare.

You have brought up an interesting thought though, I wonder if there are enough genesis and msx games with good FM music to match up to the amount of PCE PSG stuff that is good.
  I really like this here song  and this  and this   and this

for starts.

man Arlisia Dragoon is one killer soundtrack.

[Joe Redifer]

I agree that PSG (or FM) can sound better than bad redbook.  In the early days of CD gaming, companies had piss-poor musical abilities.  R-Type HuCard sounds a billion times better than R-Type CD.

[Tatsujin]

it's more about what you do with the existing technology, than damn it in the first place.

there are thousands upon thousands of good tunes out there, some are made in PSG, some in FM and some on a more sophisticated equipment or even real instruments and then recorded on a CD.

I really do appreciate every of those ways of creating video game musics, and in the end it just depends of who did it and how.

f.E. the c64 may have one of the most oldest and outdated sound chip compared to systems up to the 16bit era, but in my opinion it still sounds superior to many many chip tunes made on later systems, just do to the fact that there were (and still are) so excellent SID composers, which had squeezed really everything out of it.

[Arkhan]

 the c64 may have one of the most oldest and outdated sound chip compared to systems up to the 16bit era, but in my opinion it still sounds superior to many many chip tunes made on later systems, just do to the fact that there were (and still are) so excellent SID composers, which had squeezed really everything out of it.

The SID is more powerful than most/all PSG's.  Its basically 3 analog monosynths on one board.

Too bad they never came out with a SID-II with more stuff going on for it.

[Tatsujin]

by the way, doesn't fall FM also in the category of PSG? the term PSG just stands for Programmable Sound Generator, right? so it doesn't describe of how it must be done to achieve the creation of a certain sound. FM, PCM etc. then are just added subfunctions of a PSG.