VG Music: Technical and Overall Disscusion

[Mike Arcade]

The other day I looked into Video Game Music, we all love it and the way it sounds from the NES to Genesis and beyond, however myself and others don't generally know the technical side to creating the music for it. While you can discuss your favorite soundtracks from any games you like and such this topic is also and mainly for the technical side to it, on how the music of it was developed way back during those days and specifically what sort of software and hardware was used to develop it. On that note I have several links here that can shed a little light on this topic, specifically one link on the very chip that was in the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive...and software for DOS that was use to develop music for several Sega Genesis games.

http://www.cyclopaedia.info/wiki/Yamaha-YM2608
https://modarchive.org/forums/index.php?topic=3725.0
http://segaretro.org/GEMS

Yes, back in 2007 the GEMS development kit was released, which was an in-house software made by Sega for devs to make music for Sega Genesis games, it works on DOS and generally speaking you can make legit Sega Genesis Music on it, also I link the Yamaha-YM2608 chip as that was the same main chip that the Genesis has within it, which was ALSO the main audio chip on the Japanese PCs the NEC PC-8801 and NEC PC-9801, which I have used emulators of before to play very obscure games.

http://gdri.smspower.org/wiki/index.php/Mega_Drive/Genesis_Sound_Engine_List

Upon further detail here are a list of sound drivers that were used for many Genesis games, in correlation with what I was looking up, several companies had their own custom sound drivers which are relatively unknown such as those from Capcom and Konami, however there are others that I saw in this list such as developers Ancient (of SoR and Shinobi Fame) and TechnoSoft (of Thunder Force Fame) which have their own custom sound drivers and programs, upon that discovery I tried to see if any of them were ever leaked online, sadly that's not the case though I would LOVE to have those pieces of software as they made beautiful music, on a side note Sonic 3D Blast uses the same Sound Driver as Sonic 3 & Knuckles.

Over the years people have used, ripped, and tried to reverse engineer the music of consoles of old, again I don't know much technical detail on how accurate it is but I just wanted to share my research and discovery that you guys may or may not have known, if you or anyone else around here can fill in some of the more technical details for me please do so! Till then I thought this would be a nice discussion to have not just to gawk at our favorite music of the past but to rather understand the technical side and development of it from a newbie's perspective. Till then let me know what you guys think and any other discoveries and details you guys can find.