wise, whats the difference in video game music today versus music from 10 years ago?
The sound hardware was extremely limited compared to today – You were lucky to get 4 voices to play with. On some platforms like the 2600 or the NES these had incredible limitations – I think the oscillators on the 2600 only had about a 2.5 octave range, for example, and some of those notes didn’t play ‘in tune’. The Lynx was a major step forward, audio-wise. With 4 identical 8bit audio channels fed by 12bit shift registers you could create a lot of racket, much more detailed racket than you could on the master system or NES. Costs were dropping, so it was trivial (or at least negotiable) for us to request carts with twice or four times the ROM of the older consoles. However, the racket came out of a 1″ speaker.from the users’ perspective, it most likely sounded a lot like racket that sometimes resembled music, especially when compared with the Genesis’ 6 voices of FM, 4 voices of ‘classic’ PSG (one voice of each audio system could be dedicated on the fly to sample playback) and SNES’
