Real genesis sound compare to deflemask sound. What is the best?

Hello MazHoot!

There is the Crystal Clear Audio Mod for megadrive 2, I don't know if it can be used on megadrive 1.

I think that you will hear even more differences with samples. they tend to be gritty on real hardware, and should be much cleaner in deflemask.

About the instrument envelope differences you hear, I think deflemask can be buggy. Do you hear 'long' instruments when you export the song as .vgm and listen to it with vgmplay on your PC?

when you use your everdrive, you export as a .bin file, right?

you could also try to see if you song sounds different with this vgm player: http://mjsstuf.x10host.com/pages/vgmPlay/vgmPlay.htm

yeah, try the vgm on PC and on hardware. I think they will be more faithful to real hardware

About analogue, yeah, I think the sound will likely be cleaner, but I had no chance to hear it yet

@martin_demsky
Do you have also crashes on ipad Deflemask? If not that's maybe because I use a lot noise channel and commands on it, and perhaps i'm the only one haha...

for mega sg I think I will buy it only if I succeed make something in megadrive programming, but that's so hard (because of the fm synthesis and because the exemples on internet about sounds are often in assembly...) that I don't know if I will continue trying. Or maybe I will buy also mega sg if native MD TRACKER project will fix some problems.

I have genMDM too, I use it with arduinoboy + gameboy, but that's complicate to set up, I had good results but after stoping doing it since 3 weeks, I forget completly the complicated parameters and I don't know if I want to write a manual and read it every time I want to make music with it... at a time I used it also with organelle, I made a patch for using it with it (it should be a duplicate if I bought jamatar's tool).

I discover with deflemask a different approach which is also very interesting

Last edited by MazHoot (Dec 3, 2020 9:39 am)

It's apples and oranges, really. What sounds better is really subjective.

If by better you mean cleaner, crisper and clearer, then of course a Sega Mega Drive/Genesis sound chip emulation on a computer will be better.

But if you want better as in more organic, authentic, genuine and closer to the slightly unpredictable noisyness of the real hardware, then you won't get that from Deflemask. Having something that sounds good in Deflemask is one thing, but it will almost certainly sound different on the real hardware and this is part of the fun of making this type of chipmusic.

For that sound you need to use real hardware or another good way to get that on your computer is to use something like the Plogue chipsynth MD VST which literally emulates the noise and filters and actual electrical behaviour of the sound hardware.

@freezedream
"It's apples and oranges, really. What sounds better is really subjective."

It's IOS, not apple (joke haha... ...i'm on linux lol... but also ipad because one thing was only on it...)
Yea of course I expected responses like that, and I totally agree. I just wanted to know what is the most practiced in the community. For example, I know in lsdj community, there is a consensus on the fact that real modded gameboys sounds better than emulators even if BGB is really good.

I know good lsdj and gameboys but I'm new for sega genesis and deflemask so I wanted to know what usually people do and if there is good modded hardware which can sounds better than software. But as I understand here, there are no such rules on sega genesis music because there is no comparable prosound mods for megadrive or modded megadrives which can be buying so for what I expect (no hum) deflemask tend to be better.

Generally I prefer make music on real hardware but for me it's for the most that I love make music with gamepad, A,B, cross direction etc... and bring with me the machines when I move. That's why I never compose on computer. I tryed to use a gamepad on deflemask on ipad but it don't seem to work. I'm more quickly with LSDJ.

@martin_demsky
For me it's real crashes of deflemask, I didn't tryed yet do something in the background but what you said remember me the garageband problems with inner-app. Close to every time I use inner-app, with a lot of differents softs, it allways stop playing garageband (it's very annoying). So normally I record on zoom h4n and then insert audio in garageband for don't have this problem.

For deflemask, it just sometimes completly crash without make something on the background, all freeze and I can do nothing except quitting it and restarting. One time I even lost my last steps of work.

Last edited by MazHoot (Dec 7, 2020 12:29 pm)