Intellivision Amico - Tommy Tallarico introduction + Q&A

31 minutes ago, Tommy Tallarico said:

The 24 MEGS was mostly my fault!  (true story).

 

Me & Dave Perry had convinced the powers to be that if we had more cart space I could do a lot of great audio and I even promised and guaranteed that I'd win AUDIO OF THE YEAR AWARD if they gave us the extra space. 

 

I didn't let them down (see 1994).

https://www.tallarico.com/awards

 

 

 

I mentioned before that I was very surprised to learn that you used the GEMS sound driver on this game (and the sequel, I think). Most GEMS games sound truly terrible, like this famous example of GEMS:

but Earthworm Jim sounds great. You definitely needed that cart space for sure, since from what I understand you have to actually program the YM2612/YM3438 to generate the sounds that you want, except for when you use sampled sounds like voice acting, which I guess are just played right from the cart. More code for audio = bigger file size, and when you have 24 mega power, that gives more space for audio coding = better audio (theoretically). Still depends on how well the music is composed and how well it is coded.

19 minutes ago, Steven Pendleton said:

I mentioned before that I was very surprised to learn that you used the GEMS sound driver on this game (and the sequel, I think). Most GEMS games sound truly terrible, like this famous example of GEMS:

 

 

but Earthworm Jim sounds great. You definitely needed that cart space for sure, since from what I understand you have to actually program the YM2612/YM3438 to generate the sounds that you want, except for when you use sampled sounds like voice acting, which I guess are just played right from the cart. More code for audio = bigger file size, and when you have 24 mega power, that gives more space for audio coding = better audio.

Games sounding crappy was never the fault of G.E.M.S.  It was the greatest audio tool for its time.  Real time on-the-fly audio engine?  Unheard of in the early 90's! 

The folks who picked and made the sounds would be the ones to blame.  Not the audio driver.  It would be the equivalent of blaming the mixing board because the song sucked and was mixed badly and the instruments sounded horrible.

G.E.M.S. had an AMAZING back-end where you could tweak the FM channels and sounds to incredible accuracy... and again... in real time.  The instruments in Sonic Spinball sounded HORRIBLE.  That isn't the fault of the audio driver... we all had the same exact sound chip.  It's the fault of the person who decided that was the best sound to create and use... and that MIDI file is bad as well. 

I painstakingly hand edited every single note on every single channel to ensure they didn't step on each other and the audio sounded as good as it could.  I may take me one or two days to write a song... but one or two weeks to tweak it to where it sounded the best possible for the FM chip.  You can hear a good example of this in one of the levels of Aladdin.
 

If someone just took a MIDI file and dumped it in there and used stock crappy sounds... you get Sonic Spinball sounding stuff.

1 minute ago, Tommy Tallarico said:

Games sounding crappy was never the fault of G.E.M.S.  It was the greatest audio tool for its time.  Real time on-the-fly audio engine?  Unheard of in the early 90's! 

The folks who picked and made the sounds would be the ones to blame.  Not the audio driver.  It would be the equivalent of blaming the mixing board because the song sucked and was mixed badly and the instruments sounded horrible.

 

G.E.M.S. had an AMAZING back-end where you could tweak the FM channels and sounds to incredible accuracy... and again... in real time.  The instruments in Sonic Spinball sounded HORRIBLE.  That isn't the fault of the audio driver... we all had the same exact sound chip.  It's the fault of the person who decided that was the best sound to create and use.  

 

 

I NEVER thought I'd see someone say that it's the best sound engine of the time! I'll believe you over random dudes on the internet because you actually used the damn thing!

I've never messed with it, but I think the files are now available to download somewhere. Sad that so many GEMS games sound so bad, which probably lead to this whole "Genesis has trash audio" thing that kids these days say, but there are some really good ones like EWJ 1 + 2 and Comix Zone. There are some more, but those are the only ones I can remember without looking at the list of games that use that sound driver. I've heard stories about Sega limiting access to the other sound drivers to mostly Japanese dev teams for whatever reason, which is why lots of non-Japanese devs got GEMS instead. You know way more about it than I do, though.

Like I said in my edit before you got to it, it all depends on how well it's composed and implemented, so bad instrumentation is definitely not the fault of GEMS. Again, there are some excellent examples of games with good GEMS audio.

Totally random, but it's kind of related, so you know what I'd like to see on the Amico? A remake of Kolibri on the 32X.

26 minutes ago, Tommy Tallarico said:

I painstakingly hand edited every single note on every single channel to ensure they didn't step on each other and the audio sounded as good as it could.  I may take me one or two days to write a song... but one or two weeks to tweak it to where it sounded the best possible for the FM chip.  You can hear a good example of this in one of the levels of Aladdin.

 

 

 

 

 

If someone just took a MIDI file and dumped it in there and used stock crappy sounds... you get Sonic Spinball sounding stuff.

 

 

 

Did you edit? Weird that this part didn't show up last time...

Anyway, this would explain why the sound in your games sounds so good if you took the time to go in there and fix every note in the audio to get it to be perfect. I imagine that that's where a lot of your 24 mega power went to, like you said earlier. Lots of people seem to have the idea that the YM2612 is a piece of trash, even though it isn't and can produce beautiful music (Sonic, Gleylancer, Castlevania, Xeno Crisis) if you take the time to sit there and fix it rather than dumping some crappy code into it and calling it good.

I actually prefer YM2612 audio over the PC Engine's sound chip by a decent bit and the S-SMP (or is it the SPC700? I don't even know anymore!) in the SNES by a lot as long as it's well done.

4 hours ago, Intellivision Master said:

Does anyone remember this game?  

Yep.  It's part of my Wii collection.  A really fun game that could have been great if it only had a right stick camera control.   Wii default control setup hurt it severely.

22 minutes ago, Steven Pendleton said:

I NEVER thought I'd see someone say that it's the best sound engine of the time! I'll believe you over random dudes on the internet because you actually used the damn thing!

Yep.  It was THE BEST.  Even better than anything on the SNES as well.  All the Nintendo stuff was WAY WORSE as they barely gave any audio help to developers.  In fact... even the file format that you had to use for the SNES was a .sol file!  Standing for Shit Out of Luck!  Because every sound you put in the SNES at first had to be sent to Nintendo on a DAT tape... then they would make you an .sol file and then send it back a few weeks later on a floppy disk!

This was the first few years of SNES.  Then folks started writing their own 3rd party drivers.  Y'know who one of them was?  Good ol' Intellivision programmer David Warhol of Thunder Castle fame!  Was also the producer of Spiker!

22 minutes ago, Steven Pendleton said:

 

I've never messed with it, but I think the files are now available to download somewhere. Sad that so many GEMS games sound so bad, which probably lead to this whole "Genesis has trash audio" thing that kids these days say, but there are some really good ones like EWJ 1 + 2 and Comix Zone. There are some more, but those are the only ones I can remember without looking at the list of games that use that sound driver. I've heard stories about Sega limiting access to the other sound drivers to mostly Japanese dev teams for whatever reason, which is why lots of non-Japanese devs got GEMS instead. You know way more about it than I do, though.

Check out my stuff on Global Gladiators (this is Level 1):

Cool Spot was another one.  Here's the Bonus Level tune that a lot of folks liked:

You can see my full list of Genesis stuff here (listed under Sega Genesis).
https://www.tallarico.com/videogames

Every one of those games used G.E.M.S.

22 minutes ago, Steven Pendleton said:

 

Like I said in my edit before you got to it, it all depends on how well it's composed and implemented, so bad instrumentation is definitely not the fault of GEMS. Again, there are some excellent examples of games with good GEMS audio.

 

Totally random, but it's kind of related, so you know what I'd like to see on the Amico? A remake of Kolibri on the 32X.

30 minutes ago, Steven Pendleton said:

Totally random, but it's kind of related, so you know what I'd like to see on the Amico? A remake of Kolibri on the 32X.

You mean by the same team that we're working on that unnamed dolphin game with?

"Wouldn't That Be Something™?"

Just now, Tommy Tallarico said:

 

You mean by the same team that we're working on that unnamed dolphin game with?

"Wouldn't That Be Something™?"

I know~ That's part of why I mentioned it!

That would be something! Kolibri is trippy as hell and definitely unique and a promising concept. Safe enough for the Amico, too, since it's just a hummingbird that shoots laser beams from its face.

20 minutes ago, Steven Pendleton said:

Did you edit? Weird that this part didn't show up last time...

Yeah.  I edited and added some more info. 

20 minutes ago, Steven Pendleton said:

 

Anyway, this would explain why the sound in your games sounds so good if you took the time to go in there and fix every note in the audio to get it to be perfect. I imagine that that's where a lot of your 24 mega power went to, like you said earlier.

Not really that.  It went towards all the samples I used.   I would thrash the hell out of that 1 sample channel at all times!  And then use prioritizing to make it sound good.

Just listen to all the samples being used here.  Even the snare & kick drum were samples... but you'll notice you won't hear them when other samples are happening as their was ONLY 1 sample channel!  Pretty crazy to think about.
 

20 minutes ago, Steven Pendleton said:

Lots of people seem to have the idea that the YM2612 is a piece of trash, even though it isn't and can produce beautiful music (Sonic, Gleylancer, Castlevania, Xeno Crisis) if you take the time to sit there and fix it rather than dumping some crappy code into it and calling it good.

Exactly!  I always preferred the synthy bass sounding FM of the Yamaha chip as opposed to the weak sounding SNES 8 channel sampled stuff.  You could pull off some GREAT sounding stuff like my buddies Yuzo Koshiro did on Actraiser or Koji Kondo on Super Mario World.  But for the most part... it was pretty "thin" sounding machine because you had to use such a low sample rate and super small sample loops in order to fit everything into a cart.

Good times!

20 minutes ago, Steven Pendleton said:

 

I actually prefer YM2612 audio over the PC Engine's sound chip by a decent bit and the S-SMP (or is it the SPC700? I don't even know anymore!) in the SNES by a lot as long as it's well done.

I totally agree!

1 minute ago, Tommy Tallarico said:

Yeah.  I edited and added some more info. 

 

 

 

Not really that.  It went towards all the samples I used.   I would thrash the hell out of that 1 sample channel at all times!  And then use prioritizing to make it sound good.

 

Just listen to all the samples being used here.  Even the snare & kick drum were samples... but you'll notice you won't hear them when other samples are happening as their was ONLY 1 sample channel!  Pretty crazy to think about.
 

 

 

 

 

 

Exactly!  I always preferred the synthy bass sounding FM of the Yamaha chip as opposed to the weak sounding SNES 8 channel sampled stuff.  You could pull off some GREAT sounding stuff like my buddies Yuzo Koshiro did on Actraiser or Koji Kondo on Super Mario World.  But for the most part... it was pretty "thin" sounding machine because you had to use such a low sample rate and super small sample loops in order to fit everything into a cart.

 

Good times!

 

 

 

I totally agree!

 

 

Yeah, EWJ does have a ton of samples. Samples, especially voice acting, were generally considered to be the weakest part of the audio on the system. Still sounds good, though. The YM2612 is great and I love it!

I remember the first time I played ActRaiser, which was last summer. I knew he did the music, but when I actually played the game for the first time HOLY CRAP. ActRaiser is more like BarRaiser and the game itself is really awesome, but I should have expected as much from him. I've never liked the muffled sound of the SNES audio at all. The first time I played one was at my friend's house when I was like 6 or 7 and I thought the audio was broken or something. Still, there are plenty of great SNES soundtracks. The intro for Tales of Phantasia has that sampled singing for the duration of the whole thing and it's incredible for that system. That was by far the biggest SFC/SNES game ever made, I think, but I forgot how much mega power it has. I imagine a lot of it went into the intro and the voice acting in general.

12 minutes ago, Steven Pendleton said:

 

Because you're clearly into this stuff.  One other thing you may find really interesting that a lot of people never knew about or used (that G.E.M.S. enabled people to easily take advantage of... but never did) was the fact that there was also 4 channel PSG audio in the Genesis as well!  The same kind of sounds that you would hear in the Gameboy or NES (i.e. one of the 4 being the white noise channel).  I would use that white noise channel to act as "reverb" on snare hits and the 3 other PSG channels as digital delay & reverb on something like a guitar solo (especially when I tweaked them with a long attack & delay and then copy & pasted the guitar solo channel from the 6 channel FM and then spaced them all out by 1/10 of a second each track and lowered the volume of each one.  Imitated digital delay and/or reverb depending on how it was spaced and volumed affected. 

Here's the exact spot in Global Gladiators where you can hear it on the guitar solo if you listen closely.  Even gives it a little "feedback" as well.  Was important for it to be subtle... but something just a little different.  So while most folks were only doing 6 channels of audio on the Genesis... I was doing 10.  

1 hour ago, Tommy Tallarico said:

Not only that... how about a very special super duper limited edition hand numbered edition signed by the entire team.

 

Wouldn't That Be Something™?
 

Take my money now!  Can you throw in the original Genesis game, I know someone who needs it

5 minutes ago, Steven Pendleton said:

Yeah, EWJ does have a ton of samples. Samples, especially voice acting, were generally considered to be the weakest part of the audio on the system. Still sounds good, though. The YM2612 is great and I love it!

One last example of using those other channels on the guitar stuff before I call it a night (it's been fun to remember all this stuff).  I haven't heard this music in years... so thanks for the memories!

The guitar stuff was so subtle but really gave it an edge on everything else out there during that time.

Here it is being used on 2 songs from Muhammad Ali Boxing:

Here's a better version of the Global Gladiators tune (doesn't have gameplay and the sound fx going on).  You can really hear the "feedback" effect at the very end of the guitar solo (before it loops back to the beginning).

Here's another thing I just remembered while listening to this old stuff.

It was super easy to enable G.E.M.S. to pan channels!  Yet another little important trick that not many people ever took advantage of.

Listen to the stereo separation I was able to get here (and the bass in that chip KICKED ASS!!!!!!!)

God... I can't believe this was almost 30 years ago!  PHEW!!!

Side note:  Animation for this game was done by Intellivision Art Director Mike Dietz and the programmer was Intellivision Entertainment Co-Founder David Perry. 

Here's another good one that shows the stereo separation AND the extra voices on the guitar solo (instrument on the left) for a reverb/delay/feedback sounding effect.

1 hour ago, Relicgamer said:

Ok so almost every classic console has a version of Klax and I think a mega 8 player Klax would be epic. And really could have alot of different new ideas implemented.  Kind of like how the new breakout was changed. By the way Tommy the breakout you guys developed is the main reason I wanted the Amico.  Breakout is one of my all time favorite games. Still play a version on my microvision.  

Yes! Klax is a must for Amico. I had fun times playing it with my Atari Lynx.

On 4/4/2020 at 5:27 PM, Michael Garvey said:

@RxScram

 

How is Tommy to work for?

 

Is he as fun a boss as he seems?

 

Is there a lot of ball busting and joking?

 

You all seem very professional but also very relaxed in the videos (though some look like Tommy's bugging them and they want to just get back to work)

 

😂😅🤣

Hey @Michael Garvey,

Sorry it took so long to answer this. I had to make sure @Tommy Tallarico wasn't looking over my shoulder when I answered.  😛

Tommy is the best kind of boss... he's passionate about the project, hires people who are passionate (and damned good at what they do), and then gives directions (sometimes REALLY out there!) and then lets the team go to work. No need to micromanage, just an expectation that the people he hires is going to do what they are good at. Then, for the things he does, it's really eye opening to see somebody with his vision get to work. Audio, music, game design (more from the standpoint of "wouldn't it be more fun if this happened"), aesthetic design, etc.... he's just really damned good, plain and simple.

The overall atmosphere is relaxed and fun, but with an expectation that you'll get done what you need to get done, and that you'll help the team achieve overall success.

10 hours ago, m-crew said:

And it is quit obvious who the leader is and all the followers

It may not be that obvious because I have no idea who the leader is.

I was wondering if you might be putting out a acrylic case for Amico. I ask because the house I’m currently living in is one of the dustiest I have ever lived in so I’d like to protect the system as much as possible from dust getting inside 

12 hours ago, Tommy Tallarico said:

Nice to see @Blarneo's favorite game getting some love.

 

 

...Must...Not...Engage. 😇

Global Gladiators and Cool Spot. Both awesome Action Platformer with great gameplay and great audio. Gameplay that really made a lots of Fun to play. Something most games today are missing.

10 hours ago, Starpaddler said:

From a business perspective, its Barbie on steroids...

From a business perspective, American Girl has Amico written all over it.

Huge customer base. Appeals to pre-teen girls and moms. Mattel owned property. Edutainment focused. Affluent customer base.

And there aren't any console games for it anymore.  Just not sure who has the license. THQ made some games years ago, and now most everything is just mobile games. 

10 hours ago, cmart604 said:

As someone who has a degree in a Economics let me thank you for bringing up some horrible memories 😂

No wonder you can figure out how to fit all the video game collecting into your budget.

It all makes sense to me now 👍

7 hours ago, Relicgamer said:

Ok so almost every classic console has a version of Klax and I think a mega 8 player Klax would be epic. And really could have alot of different new ideas implemented.  Kind of like how the new breakout was changed. By the way Tommy the breakout you guys developed is the main reason I wanted the Amico.  Breakout is one of my all time favorite games. Still play a version on my microvision.  

This was my wife's alltime favorite game,and the only game she would play on the Genesis. 

Whatever the highest level was for it,she made it to that.

Klax would be an instant system seller to her,although I will already have three at that point.

Is this game confirmed as in the future plans?

15 minutes ago, wolfy62 said:

This was my wife's alltime favorite game,and the only game she would play on the Genesis. 

Whatever the highest level was for it,she made it to that.

Klax would be an instant system seller to her,although I will already have three at that point.

Is this game confirmed as in the future plans?

Midway merged with Atari Games (the other Atari) in the 90s, when Williams split off their video games division and focused on gambling machines. Now I think that Warner Bros owns this title now, since they bought Midway during bankruptcy.

Numerous pages ago, Tommy said WB is very open to licensing their games to IE.

WB is a literal congressional library of classic games. Why they only focus on DC Comics, Lego, NBA Jam and Mortal Kombat only is beyond me.

I believe WB now owns all games made by...

Midway

Atari Games

Williams Electronics

Tradewest/Leland

Cinematronics

Probably a few others I'm missing.

6 hours ago, MinerWilly said:

Yes! Klax is a must for Amico. I had fun times playing it with my Atari Lynx.

 

Ha ha just got klax for my lynx a couple months ago.  I really love this version