Final Fantasy VI SPC playback missing an instrument

"The Decisive Battle" is missing its vibraslapclap (which sounds like a hand clap). Tested on both SNESAmp (SNESAPU) and foobar 2000 GEP. The vibraslap doesn't play ingame on ZNES or Higan, either.

If it doesn't play in Higan, do you have a recording from hardware that demonstrates what it's actually supposed to sound like?

This video claims to be a hardware recording:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52CN6raI2JA#t=7m10s

None of its percussion sounds seem like a vibraslap to me, though. Maybe OP could reference a specific timing to point it out?

I'm surprised none of you remember the slap. That video was likely not taken on an SNES given that the slap isn't heard, although I think the slap was programmed to swap out for SFX (you only hear it when nothing at all is going on). Moreover, I think "The Decisive Battle" is the only song which uses it. The CD rips are apparently hard to find these days on the 'net... all the rips pretty much everywhere are from SPCs, as evidenced by the absence of the slap. Blue Laguna hosted the CD rips for years, but they're gone now.

But hey, any of you who still have the SNES game can go fight Welk and hear the goodness.

Edit: I think you're right... I confused the instrument names. I guess it was called a clap, in that it made a clapping sound. I remember it very clearly though. The clap happens about a third of the way through the song, between the first stall and the organ melody.

Here's another, if that one's no good to you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCmH_sNHAs#t=3m00s

I'm don't know what sound you're looking for here, or why you don't accept that first video as having been played on a real SNES. Is the sound present in this second version?

Why don't you record video of your own SNES to demonstrate? (I no longer own the cart, but I don't recall anything different from what we seem to have already.)


Are you sure this isn't something exclusive to whatever CD recording you're referring to?

I own the official CDs, and they sound 100% identical to a modern SPC player or SNES emulator. Old SPC players and old SNES emulators played some sounds wrongly, though.

There is absolutely no vibraslap instrument in FF6, and I do not think Uematsu ever used this instrument (although I might be wrong). He at least did not use it before Final Fantasy VIII. I suspect this whole thing is a pure invention by the OP's imagination.

I also converted all instruments songs and sound effects from FF6's SNES ROM into MIDI in order to re-insert them in the GBA version. If there was anything fancy about them, I'd probably already know by then.

I am not even sure about which "Decisive battle" you're talking about. Is it the regular boss theme, the "imortant boss" theme, or one of the last bosses theme ? (I do not think you refer to the latter since those are usually called "Dancing Mad", but who knowns).

It's the regular boss theme, and there's a clapping sound. Two of them, accompanying the hard drum sound. I know it's there because it was the most distinctive part of the song. I distinctly remember hearing them on real SNES playing on CRT TV in the 1990s. I never owned the game, but I did borrow it for a very lengthy period way back when.

The oldest fan MIDI renditions also feature the clap.
http://www.cavesofnarshe.com/ff6/midis/bossbattl.mid

And that first video looks like it was taken from Retroarch.

Bregalad you should listen to the CDs again.

I'm not sure what the MIDI demonstrates. People made lots of unusual choices for instruments with those, especially back in the mid 90s when they were likely to be played on Windows 95's OPL3 set.

I think probably what you want to do is hack the SPC to replace the snare sound with a clap sound that you like?

Nah, would like to have playback of the clap as it was on the SNES. Please cease your trolling. I'm making a reasonable request.

The only thing I hear to sound like a vibraslap is at 0:11 and 0:16 on this video.

I got the name of the instrument wrong. It's a clap, not a vibraslap. The videos are unreliable because they are made with emulation. If they were actual CD rips, then the clap would be heard at 0:17 and 0:19. It's easy to tell when it's a CD rip with Square's SNES OSTs because Uematsu ran the songs through a low-pass filter that makes the sound seem distant, grainy, and poor (which is why they aren't relied on anymore).

I'm not trolling. I suggested that because I honestly think it's the only way for you to hear the sound as you remember. I've made alternate versions of video game music in the past. I find it a fun activity.

You don't have any recorded demonstration of what it should sound like, and you've claimed that you can't find that recording anywhere. You've also rejected 2 hardware SNES recordings so far as being fake because they don't sound the way you remember, and/or you've invented some strange idea that the sound only happens in certain gameplay conditions?

Step 1 for you should be to demonstrate that it exists. Find a recording. Find a SNES and make a recording. Even just finding a second person who remembers the same thing would be a start. Until then the only solution I can possibly offer is accepting that your memory might be false, which happens. To this day I think Every Breath You Take by The Police has slightly different lyrics than it actually does, and the memory feels as real as anything to me.

I'm sure that it's not a false memory because I notice the lack of energy between the experience on the console vs the experience on the emulator. The energy is higher on the console because the clap heightens the "get up and go" of the song. I looked at the SPC in Super Jukebox and I think what's happening is channel 6 is failing to swap the crash cymbal at voice 36 for the clap. Not sure why that is, though it might well have nothing to do with the emulation... it could be a bad dump.

If I could prove the clap is in the sample set, then maybe that would be persuasive, but I know it's not easy to rip the samples from the ROM itself, let alone play them back with the correct tuning. The clap does feature in FFV (town theme "Harvest") and the two games largely used the same instrument set... probably not persuasive though.

I'll find someone else who has the CDs (and the game) and confirm from them.

In this GBA version, there's something that sounds kind of like a clap at 4:37, is that the part of the song you're referring to? I know you're talking about the original version of the game, but was wondering if it could be found in a more official alternate source. Whats funny is that I couldn't hear it when the song looped, but it's kind of hard to tell with all the sound effects going and I didn't put a lot of time into trying.
https://youtu.be/-dfhGueE-KA?t=4m33s

I don't trust SPC files much. I'm sure a lot of them have been re-dumped, but I remember a lot of (by now, really old) ones I had were often missing notes or had something screwed up at the beginning. It's just in the nature of it being a memory state dump rather than a code rip. I wouldn't rule out any SPC being bad, but those video recordings should be definitive.

I guess there's one other possibility.. there are different revisions of the game for bugfixes and such. Though I think the chances of them having made subtle changes the music are extremely remote, it's pretty much unthinkable and absurd, but I figured I'd mention it anyways. It's been 15+ years since I've played this game on cart, unfortunately (don't have it anymore).

I used Snessor95 to rip the sounds from the SNES ROM. There is indeed a snare sample in ROM, which is probably what I remember as the clap. It's very close to the clap sample in FFV SNES, which I was also able to extract.

Update: went over the SNESMusic.org SPC of "The Decisive Battle". Converted it to ROM with SPC2ROM and then looked at the samples with Snessor95. The sample in question isn't in the SPC at all (I set the search threshold to 50 bytes to make sure). But, it doesn't feature in any other songs either. I am positive it's supposed to play in "The Decisive Battle".

I agree. I'm pretty sure he's the troll and that everything's been made up by him.

What however could have been possible is that there was at some point some bug, which added garbage to one of the legitimately used sample when this song played, and this ended up sounding like a "clap". I am still highly doubtful.

Did you listen to the song from your CD? The sample is in the ROM; moreover, it was reused in FFVII (Shinra Company "broom sweep" fx). The sweeping sound is what's --missing-- from the emulated playback.

If there is sound missing from emulated output, I think this would be of great importance to byuu, the author of higan. Emulation accuracy is serious business after all. Maybe get his attention to see why this sound isn't emulated, assuming it's played on real hardware. There might be something interesting we can all learn if this behavior of the SPC, whatever is it, were debugged thoroughly.

If the sample isn't in SPC memory when the song is playing, then it is simply not supposed to be part of the song. SNES sound drivers (including the multiple ones used by Square) tend to load all of a song's samples at once before starting playback, and if that fails somehow, it's less than likely that you're going to somehow end up with a song that plays back almost 100% perfectly except for a single sample.

Common sense (and experience) suggests that if this specific song had issues under emulation, other parts of the same soundtrack probably would too, and if one of the most well-known soundtracks in the entire SNES library had noticeable issues in apparently every single SNES audio emulator that exists, shouldn't someone else have noticed by now?

Once again (and if you don't change your attitude it's my last post in this thread), you claim that there is a bug somewhere so first of all you should come with a proof. Either your or someone else's recording, or anything. Without that, your claim is empty and false, and there is no bug in neither SPC players nor SNES emulators when it comes to emulating sound in Final Fantasy VI.

Just saying "I remember" and using text descriptions of sounds you remember - which is a terrible way to do it - do not make any sense..

Bregalad the only thing you have to contribute to the topic at hand is confirmation of the playback on the official OST, so if you're not going to listen to the song from the CD you say you have....

So far no one has offered conclusive evidence that the sample in question doesn't play during the song. The first video cited was a forgery... this can be ascertained thus:
- the shape of the screen seen in the video suggests that video was not taken from a CRT, but from an LCD display. It's noticeably rectangular... this was very uncommon on CRT TVs, which all had a much more regular shape per the limitations of the tech. While S-video might indeed have been an option for recording, there's the issue that the output of SDTV to a monitor is a straight 640x480 pixels (and has been since the Windows 3.x days). I remember in the days before emulation there were no more than eight or nine screenshots of FFVI in existence, and they were all 640x480 pixels in size.
- despite the snow-free, highly pixelized output of LCDs, there are signs of scanlines and (very poor and unconvincing) interpolation. Moreover, the artifacts seen and the screen dimensions observed are all identical to those produced by Higan and Retroarch with shaders enabled (they are, in fact, distinctive to these emulators as their presets force the uneven scaling of the image to exactly this shape).

So that vid's out the window, nor are there any other such video claims on Youtube now surviving.

Your reply begs the question. The replies to you in this thread so far have contained actual referenced evidence on multiple occasions, by several people here with good ears (myself included), including one who analyses game sound engines and fixes actual bugs. We're all asking you to provide definitive proof. A response of "oh yeah? well prove I'm lying" does not change the situation (and by definition, this does border on trollish behaviour). May I politely remind you that you chose to post here with a blanket statement, inducing the discussion at hand -- and so far the proof you've provided amounts to the following:

* You "remember" it having a hand clap, therefore certainly there was one, because "it is not a false memory" (rainwarrior even gives a supportive example of incorrect remembrance through lyrics of a Police song; I have similar stories myself, both with lyrics and with music -- a common one today is a result of the cowbell SNL sketch (yes, there really IS a cowbell in the background of Don't Fear the Reaper))
* MIDI files from the 90s, where everyone and their dog was doing remixes of video game music (see: OverClocked ReMix), often badly done (missing notes were common, or people who had difficulty discerning layers of notes/music), and choice of instruments were especially limited (read up on how the MIDI file format works)
* Some blathering about OSTs and low-pass filters (which was rebutted by at least one user who does own the CDs/OSTs -- keep reading)
* Extracting BRR data from a ROM file to find evidence of a hand clap, which Revenant explained politely why is faulty logic (re: how audio engines using the SPC700 are often designed, vs. your unfamiliarity with them)

Bregalad already stated "I own the official CDs, and they sound 100% identical to a modern SPC player or SNES emulator" which means he's listened to them, and refers to the source material which you earlier stated has the hand clap sound in it. Your rebuttal to him was "well then I will find someone else with the CDs", which starts to border on conspiracy-theory-ish (respectfully). In other words: you're going to continue this crusade until you find someone who supports you, and then somehow that will act as your evidence (this isn't how technical science works, I'm afraid).

So, rather than all this hullabaloo, why not kill two birds with one stone: do what was asked of you once already: make recordings yourself from the actual SNES/SFC and put them up somewhere. If there is some odd emulation bug/quirk, then this will act as definitive evidence for byuu (bsnes/higan author) to investigate further and maybe determine the root cause. That's a win-win for you either way: if it pans out, awesome; if not, then we welcome you to what old age feels like. :-)

What say you?

tcaudilllg, it's not really our responsibility to go to a great deal of effort to disprove your claim. Rather, because your claim is so extraordinary, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate conclusive evidence that this sample does in fact play in that song on real hardware.

Moreover, your reasons for dismissing the first video do not actually hold water:

• Whether the TV was a CRT or LCD has nothing to do with the actual video signal, which would be recorded the same regardless of what TV happened to be used. Signals aren't recorded through the TV, nor are they affected by the type of TV used. They are recorded alongside the TV generally, directly from the console itself.
• The resolution of the video also is irrelevant; even if the recorded video had to be 640x480 as you say (and I don't believe this is true with modern capture cards) it was most likely downscaled to be uploaded to YouTube.
• I do not see signs of scanlines or interpolation. Rather, I see signs of heavy video compression. This is a low-quality video recording, and what you're seeing are artifacts of that.
• The screen dimensions are identical because it's 4:3, the aspect ratio of SDTV. There is nothing remarkable about that aspect ratio matching emulators using NTSC shaders, and it is not distinctive to emulators.

I seriously cannot believe this discussion is still going, but...

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/43107309/ff6.ogg

Here's a recording from my own real flesh-and-blood SNES (and here's the actual capture, in case you don't trust it for some reason...) I had to set the game to output mono instead of stereo because of a problem with my console, but other than that I still don't hear what you're talking about.

Thanks to the good people at ff6hacking (not to mention your "Friendly Neighborhood ROMz Site"), I was able to get... closer to the bottom of the mystery. A review of FF3 US ROM v 1.0 reveals the following instrument set for "The Decisive Battle".

00 0D 00 0E 00 1E 00 02 00 0F 00 11 00 12 00 22 00 21 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

Each byte-word is a reference to the instrument table (00 00 is null). The last specified instrument is the "heavy snare", the dominant percussion instrument which every official recording of the song uses.

But Uematsu apparently either had a change of heart, or something else entirely happened; because by version 1.1 (Revision "A", which corrected the Draw glitch), we get this:

00 0D 00 0E 00 1E 00 02 00 0F 00 11 00 12 00 22 00 14 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

The heavy was replaced with the snare. So there are AT LEAST two versions of "The Decisive Battle" in existence. It's fully possible that "Revision B" existed, but was never dumped and thus, lost to time. This revision may well have used the sweep instrument instead of the snare. After surveying all the surviving ROM sites, it seems they all use the GoodSNES dumps from 1996 and 2000, so it's respectably possible that additional versions existed. Still, it's a game issue and not an emulation issue, so I'm dropping the topic.

Okay, that's exactly what we needed. I just wish you'd gone about this in a more cheritable way, even if you were half-right in the end; calling all FF6 hardware recordings forgeries was going a bit overboard.

EDIT: Or not, I guess, judging from the next post? Wasn't in a position to verify the ROMs myself.

I've compared verified dumps of all three releases of the game (FFVI Japan, FFIII US 1.0, and FFIII US 1.1) and all of them contain the second bytestring, with $14 as the last instrument. If you have a ROM with $21 in that string then it's a hacked ROM or a bad dump.

As a matter of fact bank $C5 (offset $50000-$5FFFF) is 100% identical in all three versions of the game (not surprising, why would they change the music in a bugfix revision?)

Also, the instrument set you've indicated seems to be for the normal battle music, not the boss battle music. If I try overwriting it with random values, the normal battle music is the one that changes; the boss battle music isn't affected at all.

The address of the boss theme instrument list is $054415.

The thing is, it seems like we can't know for sure that there were only two releases of the game in the USA. There were like 200,000 copies or more made and we don't know the schedule of their release. I remember there being copies of FF6 in all its $80 dollar glory well into 1996 at Walmart, Kmart and others.

Seconding what AWJ basically already said, this string of bytes doesn't occur anywhere in any of the four versions of the game currently listed by No-Intro. There could well be another revision of the game floating around out there, but I'm pretty skeptical that it's any different in this specific regard.

(I don't have any of whatever known bad dumps might be listed by GoodSNES, so I can't check those.)

I'm... starting to feel like you're the sort of person who just won't admit when they might have been mistaken about something.

You keep grasping at straws to come up with elaborate reasons why you must be right: the videos are fake, the CD rips are fake, people just aren't listening to the CD, it's a never-before-noticed revision difference between v1.0 and v1.1 (which I'm starting to think was your attempt to bail out of the discussion), and now it's a never-before-seen revision entirely...

At some point, you've gotta admit that maybe the simplest explanation is that you just happened to remember it wrong. If you're afraid that admitting that would make you look bad, in all honesty it'd make you look a lot better than what you're doing right now.

EDIT: And I'm not even saying you have to be wrong. It just seems like you won't even concede it as a possibility.

Upon further research (particularly hacking the songs), it is clear to me that I was wrong and you were right. The sound I falsely attributed to the game is impossible to create with its actual instrumentation. (I guess I remembered playing that MIDI from before through the SYG-70 softsynth that came with FF7, and confused it with FF6's original instrumentation because the samples were similar). I am duly humbled and apologetic.

Cool, no problem! Glad we got that sorted out. Part of me wonders if maybe what you were remembering was the hand clap used in several songs in Secret of Mana? Examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtpaOi7Y-t8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k09qvMpZYYo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCVqfgc2730
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pyh-76qdVeU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWN8OB9nfXA

Many of SoMs tunes also use a specific snare sound that could be mistaken as a clap. Hand claps were quite prolific in 80s/90s pop music too, so there's that too... :-)

Or maybe the noise that it makes when a boss dies, which is quite particular.