Remove GBA "hissing" through emulation.

[Waygeek]

*Thread title should read 'Killing the GBA hiss through emulation', contacted a mod.

I really want to get into GBA games, but the hiss is killing me, it's constantly distracting. I've tried supposedly sound-restoration patched games, I still hear a lot of hissing in the background (do I need to set something in an emulator to use the included patch? Is the vanilla download a problem, would including a BIOS file change anything?). Are there GBA emulators that have a tool that counteracts the hiss/cleans up the music? Are there sound restoration/orchestral mod projects out there for different GBA games? Is it even possible to do with GBA rips? I'd love to try orchestral mods or at least cleaned up sound for the pokemon games, Minish Cap, and the Mario games... I'm on Windows 10 and otherwise my sound is fine.

Thanks in Advance.

 

[FAST6191]

The sound restorations are mostly for games with entries on other systems that suffered poor ports when they made it to the GBA. Nothing really to do with hiss as much as making it like other versions of the game (most final fantasy, I don't know offhand if the phoenix wright stuff ever did it for the GBA entries -- the DS versions, which were the first to appear in English, became something of the reference standard for some so various projects happened to throw various sound around.

BIOS will likely do very little of anything. It is mostly a legacy thing as some early emulators needed one and nobody had made emulator level replacements.

The hiss thing. Mostly flash carts causing it. Not sure what in an emulator would be causing it, and have never heard anybody mention it for emulators before. First suspects would be to see if you have a normalise/audio boost command in there somewhere, or a filter that fiddled with the audio.

I would also ask what you might mean by hissing noise -- is it a constant drone or most of a thing that appears at the start and end of sound clips?

 

[Waygeek]

The hiss thing. Mostly flash carts causing it. Not sure what in an emulator would be causing it, and have never heard anybody mention it for emulators before. First suspects would be to see if you have a normalise/audio boost command in there somewhere, or a filter that fiddled with the audio.

I would also ask what you might mean by hissing noise -- is it a constant drone or most of a thing that appears at the start and end of sound clips?

I'm playing on windows emulators. The hissing is in the background of the track, it's just a lot of noise, it makes the sound not very clean sounding if that makes sense, and it does cut out when there is no sound yes. I see what you mean about emulators not being held down by the systems crappy soundchip... could it be just very compressed sound files? Is there a way to mod in better sound into GBA files? Some kind of documentation or modding scene out there for it? Can't find many mentions on sound replacement on youtube, just sprite/content romhacks....

 

[VinsCool]

Your best friend will be sound interpolation. Most emulators have such an option.
It will make the sound a bit muffled, but the hissing will be reduced.

 

[FAST6191]

I'm playing on windows emulators. The hissing is in the background of the track, it's just a lot of noise, it makes the sound not very clean sounding if that makes sense, and it does cut out when there is no sound yes. I see what you mean about emulators not being held down by the systems crappy soundchip... could it be just very compressed sound files? Is there a way to mod in better sound into GBA files? Some kind of documentation or modding scene out there for it? Can't find many mentions on sound replacement on youtube, just sprite/content romhacks....

Sound wise the GBA mostly uses the so called sappy format. It is not quite as all encompassing as the SDAT format the DS used but it was certainly very common. I find it really boring though so I have been putting off writing the sappy section for my hacking docs ( https://gbatemp.net/threads/gbatemp-rom-hacking-documentation-project-new-2016-edition-out.73394/ ) for years now.
Three main things to see any work are the final fantasy stuff ( http://www.romhacking.net/documents/462/ , though that is pretty general purpose), fire emblem (not sure where it is all going on now but pending something better http://www.feshrine.net/hacking/ ) , advance wars ( http://forums.warsworldnews.com/viewtopic.php?p=34103#34103 ) and maybe Golden Sun (atrius did a lot of work with this).

Oh and http://belogic.com/gba/ (navigation at the top) and http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#gbasoundcontroller because why not. Don't know if any of the folks at https://hcs64.com/mboard/forum.php ever tangled with it but who knows.

The GBA does have a noise channel in its audio hardware, many games will use this to add a bit of depth to things -- while I imagine any 16 bit era audio fiddler would have jumped at the chance to have GBA audio hardware it is also not exactly geared like an Amiga, modern device or even some of the stuff on http://macgateway.com/featured-articles/sound-card-history/
You could try disabling said sound channel (don't know if modern VBA will allow it but I believe I saw it on a version at some point in the past, definitely not sure about mgba). Similarly most times we ever saw a dev properly attempt a speech sample it was... sub par but you did not mention that.

Really though you are the first person to note something like this in emulation that I can recall. It is no shock that my ears would miss something (power tools, concerts, engines and some suspect genetics all ganged up on them) but I have not heard the complaint elsewhere and the folks at that hcs64 site count some very good listeners among their number (as in can spot blind when a decay is handled wrongly), as do a bunch doing rips and making playback things for all those nice media players. Many of the games mentioned at rather popular too. I am not prepared to rule it out though as many of those probably got used to the original way. Still I would check the rest of the audio path on your computer in case something got pumped in volume (most audio peeps on the home consoles have never heard of volume and will peg everything at max, any extra your computer does on top of that being very likely to see clipping).

 

[Waygeek]

Thanks for all that info. It's weird, I've heard lots of people complaining about the GBA's sound solution.

Ended up buying FFV on Steam too, I expect the sound there to be cleaner, pity it's the mobile port that didn't see any modding around its release for whatever reason, no orchestral mod or sprite replacements like FFV and Chrono Trigger that I can find

 

[FAST6191]

It's weird, I've heard lots of people complaining about the GBA's sound solution.

Oh the GBA's DAC is terrible, the backing hardware rather behind the times when it was current (though still better than a lot of what came before), and most GBA audio bothering types were not a patch on the people doing good stuff on the C64, amiga, NES and megadrive, but as far as straight noise, much less in emulation, it is new to me.

I don't know your history/background here, and while there are some amazingly talented people playing with game audio most of those have a bit of a thing for it being like the original (be it hardware or games) and will seek to replicate that, warts and all. If you come from a more music appreciation background it might well have some very different results.

Probably should have asked before then. If you go around your chosen video watching website looking at people playing the games (some will be VBA or other emulators, some will be GB players, some might even be GB players with some special tweaks) do you get the same thing?

Also yeah most modern PC releases of Square(Enix) titles did not get done amazingly well.