Dragonfox wrote:
I'm certain that during development, they were playing the original and held a microphone against the speakers while someone was fiddling with the sound test. Then they asked EspioKAOS to remix the music through his MIDI synthesizer and held a microphone against his computer speakers. Then put the recordings on the game.
You can't do that.... GBA can't do streaming audio, it would require way too much CPU power that the GBA can't provide. You see, MP3 and OGG codecs need a floating point processor to decode the compressed audio. While the GBA CAN do floating-point math, it's damn sluggish because floating-point math is being EMULATED; there is no dedicated floating point processor (FPU) in the ARM7.
So the other options are softsynths (which eat up a lot of CPU) or MODs (which is an old Amiga format that combines MIDI and sample data together.). Most people go with the MOD format because the GBA's PCM channels can help out with the MOD playback, taking some load off of the GBA's CPU. Most likely Sonic is using a softsynth, because it has some FX artifacting that softsynths have, and obviously the lag/slowdown that you all see.
Either way, you cannot put audio recordings on a GBA without a larger cart containing more ROM and a FPU.
Secondly, WTF is EspioKAOS?
EDIT: Google educated me, don't make fun of John Weeks. I've listened to his MIDIs on VGMusic for quite some time and I must say he is QUITE the sequencer.
This Sonic music sounds more like the music in Sonic Roboblast 2.