In Comix Zone the SN76589 has a very important protagonism in various tracks. I love that game.

I was chatting with Tappy at Cheapbeats and apparently Hally (surprise surprise) got some kind of PWM out of the SN76496. It was really odd values though, 93.6 or something.

http://www.smspower.org/Music/MISSION76 … e2b747936f

You can control the noise channel to some extent by using the 3rd square wave channel of the psg right? I wonder if anything fun happened there?

Yeah that's what I meant, bit depth. Like the C64 sound driver by THCM!

I'm not sure you can get higher quality out of the PSG than the FM part (the CPU is probably the limit in these cases; I think people pushed sample rates > 50 kHz), but at least you could have more independent sample channels for sound effects/speech without interrupting FM playback. In the MSX scene, I think there's been some experiments with combining PSG (ay-3-8910 / ym2149 ) voices to produce samples with higher bit depth, though, and I'm sure something similar could be possible on SN type chips as well.

Playing higher quality samples would be a great thing to have.

Yeah, I can't think of any particularly weird uses of the PSG in games. Just guessing, it might have been used to play samples on occasion. Also, I don't think that japanese game designers used a lot arpeggio chords (as in 0xy-like effects), even on systems with a lot less sound channels than the MD.

Two nice uses I've found of PSG channels is either as delay channels for FM leads or playing in unison with FM. Since the PSG will mostly be slightly out of tune unless you apply some tricks, it can fatten things up a bit.

Examples of Modern compositions would be interesting too!

I was wondering if you guys know of any interesting examples of PSG in genesis soundtracks. It's used pretty extensively throughout Streets of Rage, and Sonic the Hedgehog can make for another good demonstration.

I'm assuming, though, that with all the extra channels there was no 'need' for the bells and whistles like noise bass or even arpeggios. I haven't found any crazy uses of the PSG in MD music yet, I'm guessing that might be limited to modern compositions...