this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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For me, that is a very fun fact. I can hear that "SEGA" in my head. Now it seems obvious, but little kid me didn't understand why we had such amazing graphics and sound, but so few spoken words.
The video game goddesses "sega" and the dude gods "rise from the grave" are probably the earliest I remember.
"Finish Him" from Mortal Kombat was also genesis no? "Round 1, FIGHT!" I think was street fighter, but for me at least sf2 on SNES was my intro to that series..
Anywhoots I'm less mad now about balders gate 3 asking me to pick a voice for my character that it (so far, for me) uses for literally none of the dialog options.
Earliest voice I can remember in a game was BLADES OF STEEL on the NES.
Mine was SKI OR DIE, and young me was very impressed. If anything, I might actually be more impressed now by the ingenuity in tricking chiptune technology into sounding plausibly like a human voice!
The NES actually did have a 7-bit PCM audio channel, there wasn't really any "tricking" beyond finding the storage capacity to hold a sample of useful size.
Okay, more I'm legitimately interested. All this time I'd assumed that the voice was a clever manipulation of the chiptune tech to make it sound like a human being. But it was actually just a dramatically compressed audio clip? That might be even more impressive.
Some technical details then, if you're interested!
https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/APU#DMC_($4010%E2%80%93$4013)
The most important point for getting "higher" quality audio from it is probably this:
Which is why you generally only heard it on title screens. Usage in games was much rarer, and usually much shorter samples.