64 music channel usage

[wataro]

During the development of the Dreamcast Yu Suzuki and the team requested the Yamaha soundchip be upgraded from a 32 channel processor to 64, as seen in the Shenmue making of documentary.

40~ min

Do any of the music tracks use all 64 or over 32 channels ?
Or is there any point in the game that goes over 32 channels including music voice SFX combined?
There must be or they wouldn't have been so adamnt on the upgrade?

I'm no music buff but I'm sure there's tools to analyze channels in a track but is it possible with the game rips or real time play via phono put or such?

The opening theme is probably up there with the busiest tracks but anyone know for sure?

Any Dreamcast dev tools or a way to find out?

 

[Darkfalz]

The Dreamcast MIDI format has been converted to VGM but I haven't found anything that actually plays back the format with samples. Could be more so that the music uses X number of channels and they need another 8+ channels to mix the ambient/sound effects in.

Since most other games use ADX for music they only required one channel to play this back.

 

[BlueMue]

I doubt there is a music track that even makes use of 32 channels but there are a lot of sound effects going on at one time in Shenmue so that's why they strived to have more room.

 

[wataro]

The Dreamcast MIDI format has been converted to VGM but I haven't found anything that actually plays back the format with samples. Could be more so that the music uses X number of channels and they need another 8+ channels to mix the ambient/sound effects in.

Since most other games use ADX for music they only required one channel to play this back.

Thats what I thought, it would only be one channel sampling the music track and not streaming each sound per channel,
maybe they planned to do something in a previous time but due to data constraints and compression ect, more revisions and cuts were possibly made ...

I doubt there is a music track that even makes use of 32 channels but there are a lot of sound effects going on at one time in Shenmue so that's why they strived to have more room.

I know dobuita street is quite busy, you have the main theme, tomato mart mix, moped, dog, sweeping up, door sounds, birds, footsteps, xmas music, voices, tom, button and diary beeps, watch alarm, theres like a general background murmur I guess is one track

damn it's like pandoras box when you start listening for these things that so seamlessly blended into the background haha

 

[Vivi-gamer]

Wow. That was a fantastic making of video! Loved the defintion of the Cycle Program & How they're looking at Final Fantasy VIII as an example of a different game out there. Sorry it wasn't an inofmative post but it really made my evening :) This is the sort of project I am hoping the Kickstarter one will be able to manager when reaching their goal - I'd love to see such detail on the making of Shenmue III

 

[Sappharad]

I'm no music buff but I'm sure there's tools to analyze channels in a track but is it possible with the game rips or real time play via phono put or such?

Any Dreamcast dev tools or a way to find out?

I sort of did this around 2012 when I was playing with modizer's source code to try and get DSF's playing back at full speed on an iPhone 4. (Obviously nowadays phones are so fast that none of the hacks are needed anymore.) I don't know of an actual DSF player that can do it via the UI, but when I was experimenting I tried disabling some channels via code to see if it would improve performance. It did, but only when those channels were actually being used.

It doesn't answer your question about how many channels Shenmue tracks use, but I do know it's feasible to modify a DSF player to track how many are enabled and/or disable some. If there are any open source DSF players for PC that are easy to compile and modify that might be the best option to answer your question. I don't know if anyone's going to be willing to spend the time to find out though.

 

[wataro]

Wow. That was a fantastic making of video! Loved the defintion of the Cycle Program & How they're looking at Final Fantasy VIII as an example of a different game out there. Sorry it wasn't an inofmative post but it really made my evening :) This is the sort of project I am hoping the Kickstarter one will be able to manager when reaching their goal - I'd love to see such detail on the making of Shenmue III

Really a great video, so glad someone recorded it and preserved it, there was another video Network Jungle 3 (this was 2) from around the same time that also had intresting content but is nowhere to be found currently.
Really envious of anyone who got to look in the remains of the Shenmue archive.
Fortunatly nowadays camera, photos and digital archiving are much easier and cost efficent and easy to share, we should see some great insights on the making of Shenmue 3 I hope!

It doesn't answer your question about how many channels Shenmue tracks use, but I do know it's feasible to modify a DSF player to track how many are enabled and/or disable some.

Wow thanks for the info either way it's nice to know there's still hope!
It would be so great to get the original uncompressed game assets and music... In this lifetime!

 

[GYO6161]

i would love to have a DSF player where you can mute channels independently that would be super interesting. Foobar has a plugin where you can do this with various arcade games and its very neat.

I would love to mess around with the code of the players to achieve this but i don't got any coding knowledge lol.