SNES .SPC Player on FPGA

[tyranitar87]

Chrono trigger!

[tibabo]

can do the same with SnesMusic on iPhone

[triplenippel123]

what song is it from the castlevania 4 ost ( 1:35 ) ?

[Julienfun]

@triplenippel123 Beginning

[huynhxuanan]

To Author : How do the led blink so exactly follow the music?

[Teknokrade]

NNNNNNEEEEEEEEED IT

[Biopharmer]

is the output in stereo?

[mightymax1983]

Awesome! Please give us a tutorial.

[randomshinichi]

YEAH FFVI!!!!! FFV!!!! Zelda!!!

[Torinocto]

good songs!

[speyeker]

I'm also in ECE at U of T (third year), and I'm jealous of your talent. I sucked hard at Verilog when I studied it, and while I was much better at Assembly, I still wasn't the best at it either. I've used both in regards to the DE2, but this...man, I would have absolutely no idea how to do it at all. You're a pure genius, man. I'm guessing this was your ECE496 project?

[speyeker]

Oh never mind, I see you go to École Polytechnique de Montréal. That's an engineering school. Uh, yeah...that explains why you're so much better than me...<_<

...Man, I'm so jealous.

[CodeJeffo]

@speyeker ooh come on, you don't have to be jealous. This is really amazing fpga project, but when you check the files you can see there is a lot of auto generated vhdl files - nios or mega function related. So it's really perfect chance to learn how to design something like this when you see the result and can check the sources. I wish you good luck. ... anyways jcv32 made good job.

[Agilo3]

I just briefly glazed over the VHDL and.. holy SHIT that's been a lot of work!

My hat's off to you, seriously; very nice work!

[IMakeOrWatchVideos]

was this just for fun?

[thomas997]

hey, how many bits of resolution does the DAC have on that Altera board? did you implement a ROM memory, then use the switches to select the starting addresses in the ROM? I could be wrong, but I don't think you synthesized these songs your self, you would need a whole lot of discrete filter banks to do this and I don't think that Altera board has enough resources to do this.

Regardless, nice job dude.

[Jcv32]

This altera board have a 16 bit DAC. Song are RAM save states. They are stored in a zip file on the flash rom. Switches load different files. If you don't believe the sound is synthesized by the FPGA, look at the sources.

[patrickikis]

Impressed!

[Stormtrooper595]

oh my bad nvm lol

[Stormtrooper595]

is that the sound board used in the snes?

[expertfighter]

please i'm getting bored from your spam or publicity,stop it !

[obeest]

damn, these tunes are epic

[johneymute]

donkeykong country proved that the snes could generate cd quality sound,no wonder besides the spc700 chip it has a 16bit s-dsp chip running at 24mhz,that,s incredible.

[dracosilv]

I don't know if you noticed, but some of the sounds had their beginning notes 'chopped off' 1:08-1:14 (Chrono Trigger).

[yanorei]

so let me get this straight. the songs on the snes are not a bunch of prerecorded songs but a bunch of sampled instruments that are controlled via some sort of arrangement? like a midi file? if someone wanted to take control of the samples on a snes game then they could eh?

[ryanthescooterguy]

The Final Fantasy music sounds very similar to Kirby Superstar's!

[ryanthescooterguy]

How was music created for video games during the 16-bit era?

[ponsetipoquer]

NIos II can be 32 bits

[djsmithy]

I think the snes was basically a sampler, very similar to how MIDI works on pcs,

it was basically a collection a samples with different notes triggered.

The MegaDrive on the other hand used a Digital FM Synthesizer, it also had sample/PCM playback, but a very low sample rates, these were generally used for the drums in games.

[noraui]

lol, I just noticed you used binary on the switches.

[Individualism101]

lol! What else would he use?

[noraui]

Did you need to do audio configuration with the NIOS II terminal? I was somewhat confused how to do that.

[gzaloprgm]

Only recognised 1 :P SMB1 Song

[benfirst]

Nice. I could get about 75% of those from memory. SNES IS the best.

[basniak]

3:32 - 3:50 Is actually

Kirby's Triumphant Return.

[patrickvalk]

can you post him without that beep sound ???

[Cabnfever]

Awesome :)

[Dforce3000]

Very cool, i love it!

[coondogtheman1234]

how does the SNES store voices are they samples

[Individualism101]

Yeah must be wave samples.

[djsmithy]

Yep, PCM samples. The instruments used are PCM samples too asfaik.

[neptho]

What a waste of hardware..

[clownhorse]

what songs are at 2:17, 2:26 and 2:27? They sound really cool.

[laserbeak43]

impressive work. congrats. I'm still trying to figure out my spartan board :) maybe i can steal some of your VHDL?

[Resetti64]

What are the name to these games and songs?

[Jcv32]

I added annotations with the name of games and songs.

[jamesecash]

What was the first song? It was very pretty...

The third song (0:22) was from super caslevania...

2:40 sounds like the title screen for FFVII on PS, I haven't played the previous Final Fantasy RPGs...

Super Mario World...

[UnlimitedProductions]

First song is from Donkey Kong Country 1 - When you're underwater.

[UnlimitedProductions]

The first song is from Donkey Kong Country 1 - When you're underwater.

[jamesecash]

Thanks! I'll have to get the midi file...

[benjaminshinobi]

This is great, how long did it take you to make it? I've been learning ASM for a bunch of different processors and have been really wanting to get into CPLD's and FPGA's.

[paradigmmaker]

the only thing i hate about VHDL is that u cant have fking 'events with in IF statements... u need to have them at the upmost statement.. fucking annoyyyignggggg

[jdsony]

That thing is freakin cool. I wish I had one.

[nomy13]

Did you use verilog or assembly/c

[Jcv32]

The S-DSP part (the sound generator) is written in VHDL. The S-SMP part (the sound and music processor) is written in C and executed on a Nios II soft processor. I wrote some custom CPU accelerators in VHDL for timers and handling. There is additional glue logic written in VHDL and a I2C config device written in Verilog.

[nomy13]

Oh alright. Awesome work! Im here studying ECE at University of Toronto and we had similar projects - the most recent one being building something cool with assembly.

[chubu]

2:25, I demand to know what that song is. IT'S KILLING ME

[Jcv32]

Singing Mountain - Chrono Trigger

[shalpp]

what the fuck

TEACH ME HOW TO MAKE IT!!

[leonardoliveira]

Pretty impressive work of reverse engineering. Re-building something commercial from reversed information out of emulation is a very good way to learn how things work. I really appreciated this work and will look into the information you put on your website with utmost care.

Congratulations for this impressive achievement.

[SunriseSucks]

Would be great to know the name of the song that starts at 01:45

[SunriseSucks]

Nervermind, it's FFVI - The Fierce Battle

[johneymute]

yeah pretty awesome i hope to see atleast some one wich will put the snes sound chip into a cd player to see if it can handle cd,s would be great.

if not? than they can use a chip wich turns every cd song into brr format, will the snes sound chip decompress it back to 16 bit sound.

all in real time.

[MathOnNapkins]

Sounds like Tales of Phantasia (90% sure)

or Treasure Hunter G (10% sure)

[Jcv32]

That's tale of Phantasia

[torascie]

Anyone know what the song at 3:11 is?

[spedzfx666]

2:55/2:56 Is Star Ocean.

[8monoxxx]

Im sure that one is starfox :D

[Obbyto]

I loved (and still do!) SNES music!

[SunriseSucks]

Booster's Tower of SMRPG... i just thought about this song a minute ago and then it shows up in this vid, great!

[memblers]

Nicely done.

[nicofarr]

Wow! This is great! Where did you find the specifications for the DSP parts of the SNES sound hardware?

Here are the name of the songs I recognize : Final Fantasy 6, Super mario world, Chrono Trigger, Zelda 3 a link to the past, Tetris attack

[Jcv32]

You can find a lot of information in the external link of the Wikipedia entry for SPC700. I also studied emulator code. And you got 5 games out of 15

[magjansson]

What a great project, nice work! In Which RTL language is it written? Is the source code open-source for a home project hobbyist. Would be fun to try and port it to Xilinx tools/cards. I have 2 Xilinx cards and a home-made Extension card for extra media connectors. Your project would be fun to port. Search for "Arcade Extender" and "ArcadeExtender" here on YouTube to see some more about my extension-card.

Are you using any Altera-specific hard-macros or is it clean VHDL/verilog?

[Jcv32]

The S-DSP core is pure VHDL. However, it interfaces with Altera synchronous RAM blocks (dual-port 2 cycle read,1 cycle write) and Avalon switch fabric interface for external device (SRAM, S-SMP). The whole system use lot of Altera specific and board specific features. I will setup a webpage soon with source and information.

[siskavard]

This is very cool! I've been wondering if there is a way to compose your own SNES music. Is this a composer, or are you just playing SPC files? Great work!

[Jcv32]

It's playing .SPC files. The FPGA reproduces SNES sound hardware. The SPC files contain memory and registers snapshot from a specific moment in a game (when a particular music is being played). By restoring this state, a program is run on the S-SMP (SPC700 microprocessor) and commands sent to the S-DSP. The S-DSP then produces music.

[siskavard]

Thanks for the reply. I've been trying to find information about how the music composing process worked for these games back in the day, hard to find though. I know the composers wrote the music on midi keyboards, but thats all I know.