Are there any versions of Genesis games that are better then the SNES verision?

[Icarus Moonsight]

Thank you for having a fair enough disposition to not only challenging my post, but also extending a correction along with it. I can work with that.

You are completely right here: "EQ'd down" was sufficient.

I think it might have been lost, but the context I'm mainly concerned about is my use of the sound hardware for my own purposes. I love the STs for CV4, ActRaiser 1/2 and many others. It was my understanding that the SPC700 and the DSP co-pro used a low-pass filter to affect, in some form (shorthand for IDK how exactly), of anti-aliasing (an attempt to smooth quantization more fully). All I know is I have heard very faint bass (in quality more times than simply volume) or clipping/distortion - almost tearing in the worst cases, when low freq sounds are put out at the same level as the mid and high range. Am I wrong about the cause of what I hear? You seem to think so. Do you have a better explanation for it? I'm a big boy, I can take it.

About emulators... I've heard that some emulators run the sound with the low-pass filter process bypassed or totally omitted as an improvement. I've heard both sides (+/-) of that though, not sure since I don't deal much with emulators. I am talking about the actual hardware though.

There are times when you could think to yourself "boy, what I wouldn't be able to do with this post...sometime when I'm writing about something I talk about." Writing crazy stuff isn't going to get you that hot journo position that'll let you ask Kutaragi "WTF he was thinking" when he designed one of the best sound subsystems in a game console ever.

I've been beaten to it - Super Castlevania IV came immediately to mind.

It's been a little while since I glanced at some SPC700 references (the Alpha-II ones actually) and yeah..nothing there about filters that I remember.

The secret (such that there is one) of the SNES sound hardware is...well, it's complicated. The ability to run code at the developer's whims was a big part of its success; they just programed something to run a file, MIDI or whatever format they liked; it could be an Amiga tracker style thing (Wolf Child seems to me an example of this) or it could be quasi-chiptune, or it could use samples heavily as Super Castlevania IV did (not to say the others don't). So if somebody doesn't know how to use bass, or the musician's tracker setup doesn't produce good bass, that gets sent right over and the 8-bitter faithfully duplicates that unconvincing bass when playing the song format sent over by the SPC700. You can set up wavetables, kind of, I guess, on the SNES, but I don't think there are fixed ones. You simply load in a program and whoo off it goes! It gets sent over to the sound chip with the schedule of notes and the rest.

I don't get the "Bass is basically EQ'd down in db" line. I had to think for a moment to remember that you didn't mean Dairy Queen (some kind of Process I think) but decibels (which is what EQ would do, which seems a redundant thing to say, to me). Could you be judging the SNES by an emulator or television speakers going bad or something?

The Genesis did fairly well because the main portion was an off-the-shelf synth chip that was designed to be an all-in-one. Many folks knew the series from programming arcade chips or from using Yamaha synthesizers. You could do great things with it, but only within an envelope. Unless some game loaded in some custom samples (I thought those were saved for sound effects mainly) you were stuck with the on-chip samples.