8 BIT EXCITEBIKE CODE

They just implemented stuff that sounded about right on the games they were testing on. Later, they started supporting the effects, but nobody understood how the DSP was actually implementing those effects, so they didn't sound quite right. However, when a game actually used those features, everything sounded wrong. This worked OK for most games, because they didn't use those features. They treated it as if it were a simple sample playback device. Older SNES emulators didn't really emulate any of this. It's implemented as a custom DSP, which does sample decompression, high quality resampling, mixing, has an envelope generator, several effects (programmable FIR filter, echo, panning), and a noise generator. The actual hardware is more complicated than just a sample mixer.

8 BIT EXCITEBIKE CODE

Obviously, you have to emulate all of that accurately, or the code that controls the sound output might not work correctly. It has a control CPU, and it's own RAM, with no access to the contents of the cartridge, or to main RAM. The SNES sound hardware was a little bit more complicated than that. Here are some examples of the other failings of many SNES emulators: I suspect issues with SNES emulation are simply that all of the SNES emulators we have are fairly poor in _all regards_, it's just that it's easier to notice in the sound than in things like timing. These pages know more about SNES audio than I do: (Fun fact: some people suggest that the N64's sampled audio can meet - or exceed - CD quality!) The NES and all of Nintendo's other hardware used to synthesize its sound in real-time, but that changed with the SNES, which introduced sample-based audio instead.

However, (if I understand everything I've read correctly) the SNES didn't have a 'sound chip' in the same sense that the NES (or GameBoy, C64, etc.) did. This may be the case for some emulators - such as the NES emulator in excitebike. I guess it's because of trying to support the capabilities of the actual sound chip?

8 bit excitebike