Rules for replicating PS1 SPU in a modern environment/Looking for three PSF rips by sabored at 2:41 PM EDT on April 17, 2017
I'm intrigued by the tendency of PS1 composers to bitcrush their samples, despite (to my understanding) having to encode them at 16 bit, 22,050 Hz for the VB soundbank. I'm curious as to whether it was an aesthetic thing or a necessity to save space on the disc.

I've recently had the urge to reverse engineer some of these songs. Unfortunately, I come more from the audio side of things than the coding side, so creating PSF files is a bit beyond my current knowledge. There are three games in particular that I'd like to hear multi-tracked files of. Dragonseeds, G-Darius, and Tomba! 2. Specifically, these tracks:

Dragonseeds - Clone Lab
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alyhP4JZ6W4
G-Darius - Network
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIL7O97bjos
Tomba! 2 - Water Temple (Cursed)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8hFpfHswBE

I'm also trying to write a set of rules to follow for replicating Playstation 1 music in a modern environment. Here's what I have so far:
-24 Tracks of monophonic sample playback, noise, or frequency modulation
-Samples are mono, 16 bit, 22,050 Hz
-Forward looping possible from end of file, sample size multiple of 28
-Pan law of -3dB

Any help with the PSF files or contributions to the list would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks so much!


edited 4:35 PM EDT April 17, 2017
by jimbo1qaz at 5:41 PM EDT on April 17, 2017
I think PS1 samples were encoded in some form of ADPCM (Playstation BRR). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_Rate_Reduction.
by Kirishima at 6:30 PM EDT on April 17, 2017
It wasn't to save disc space, it was to save ram space. The ps1's spu only had 512 kbs of ram.

Also, G-darius never even used the ps1's spu for music. The arcade version used a custom soundchip, Zoom-ZGS, for music, while the ps1 port streamed everything.

edited 6:32 PM EDT April 17, 2017

edited 6:35 PM EDT April 17, 2017
by sabored at 9:18 PM EDT on April 17, 2017
@Kirishima

So the samples didn't have to be encoded at 22,050 Hz? How were the sample rates chosen?

And that's interesting about G-Darius. It sounds like it was created under the same specifications. I guess the delay is out of the ordinary.
by kode54 at 10:31 PM EDT on April 17, 2017
The samples for the sound chip could be any arbitrary factor of 44100Hz. The base sample rate of 1000h was 44100, while 800h would be 22050Hz, etc.

Frequently, games streamed 44100Hz audio, even if it wasn't Redbook.
by sabored at 11:35 PM EDT on April 17, 2017
@kode54

What does the h correspond to?

Also, hey! I recognize your name! You made that Playstation reverb emulator for foobar!
Any chance of turning that into a DAW plugin of some sort? I'm sure a lot of people would jump right on that.
by kode54 at 7:46 PM EDT on April 18, 2017
Hexadecimal. And I don't know the first thing about making VST plugins, but I could probably get Falcosoft to look into it, since they've already produced some VSTi plugins.
by sabored at 9:23 PM EDT on April 18, 2017
That would be awesome! A lot of audio folks are really into simulations of old hardware. It would be super cool if there were an emulation of the effects processor, and then some form of modeled saturation of the various PlayStation models.

And very interesting! So were the samples were stored at high sample rates, but resampled to save memory?
by kode54 at 10:18 PM EDT on April 18, 2017
They were stored at whichever sample rate they were authored at, it could be anything. Typically, they authored musical instruments between 8kHz and 44kHz, and the sound chip resampled for different notes. Instruments could also use multiple samples for different note ranges. It all depended on the software used to author the games and also to run the resulting music on the system.

I only say they used 44100 for streaming, because that's the native sample rate of the sound chip, and the CD could read fast enough to support that data rate. It doesn't mean nobody used lower rates.

Some games are infamous for using crappy solutions. For instance, MDK 2 on the PS2 used 44100Hz mono streaming music. The only original release of that game to use full Redbook audio was the DreamCast version, since there were over 70 minutes of audio on top of the 350+MB of game data. The current HD release probably fixed this for other platforms, though.


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