Saturn CPS-2 Ports: Missing QSound Screen

[TrekkiesUnite118]

This has come up on another forum and I was curious what people here thought of it. Basically the audio quality of the CPS2 fighter ports on the Saturn isn't quite as good as the other versions. Coincidentally none of the Saturn ports have the Q-Sound boot screen that is found in the Arcade versions as well as the PS1 and Dreamcast ports. Oddly enough however some of them do have Q-Sound logos on the game boxes.

So I think that possibly the Saturn versions don't actually use Q-Sound. That might explain why the Q-Sound screens are absent in every Saturn port while they are there in the other ports. It would also possibly explain the slightly lower quality in audio.


So any one have any thoughts or theories on why these screens are missing in the Saturn ports?

[zyrobs]

The Q-Sound effect on the CPS2 games was just a sort of echo effect ontop of the normal sample synth audio (and an increased stereo separation too?). The background music recordings have this pre-applied as they are likely just recordings from the arcade machines. The sound effects may or may not have them but it doesn't really matter since they are all much lower quality.

Vampire Savior used sample playback on quite a bunch of short tunes, and there are a lot of subtle differences between those and the arcade versions, but they are mostly simplifications due to RAM concerns (4mb ram expansion or no, the sound ram still only worked with a 512k ram bank).

The q-sound screens could be missing simply due to licensing. The japanese x-men cota trial disc still had that screen by the way, it was removed in the final game.

Q-Sound was just a buzzword to a sort of echo DSP filter. Tons of Sega CD games had them too even though that hardware was entirely incapable of any such effect, but it had cd audio tunes that were mixed in/with q-sound.

EDIT: about the q-sound licensing... Q-sound enabled CPS1/2 games included a sound chip that had a DSP filter with an onboard rom. This is what adds the actual q-sound effect, which sounds a lot like some eq+reverb or so (compare recordings from MAME to recordings of the real hardware - MAME is missing the Qsound rom, so no effect).
Anyway, this is likely the patented q-sound code. So, this piece of software was included in all those cps1/2 games, and therefore they had to show the license screen. Saturn games don't have this code inside, so I imagine they don't require the license screen.

[TrekkiesUnite118]

The PS1 and Dreamcast ports do have the screen though. So would that mean they somehow use that Q-Sound code?

[zyrobs]

Not unimaginable.

Of course, they may be missing those screens for entirely different reasons.

[TrekkiesUnite118]

Well they could be missing for a different reason, but the fact it's only the Saturn ports is a bit odd. Also as you said an early build of X-Men CotA had it and then they removed it for the final release, which is again odd.