Sega

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Sega Corporation
Sega.svg
Founded 1940
Headquarters Ota, Tokyo, Japan
Website www.sega.com

The Sega Corporation is one of the largest video game companies in the world. They are known for the creation of the Sega Master System, Genesis, Saturn, Dreamcast, and arcade machines. They are also known for their Sonic the Hedgehog, Space Harrier, and other games series.

Games

Music Development

Sega Master System

The composers wrote their music in Z80 assembly macros using a standard sound driver, which possibly developed by Katsuhiro Hayashi or Tokuhiko Uwabo. Some games supports FM sound unit, which developed by Kazuhiko Nagai.

Starting from 1990, the composers began to make use of the SMPS (Sample Music Playback System) driver, which also used in most of Game Gear games. This driver was possibly developed by Tokuhiko Uwabo. According to credits of Kenyuu Densetsu Yaiba, sound driver was modified by Masayuki Nagao.

On The G.G. Shinobi and Sonic the Hedgehog, Yuzo Koshiro composed music using Music Macro Language and converted his music to his own sound driver. After he moved to M.N.M. Software, he used Mikito Ichikawa's sound driver.

At American division, Paul Hutchinson programmed his own sound driver in Z80 assembly and manually typed his own music to driver via assembly. Later, this sound driver was licensed to various western developers and groups, like Sega Ineractive, Novotrade, Byte Size Sound and Tec Toy. Games by Realtime Associates uses modified version of same driver by David Warhol, which supports MIDI files.

Genesis

The production of music and sound effects differed between Sega America and Sega Japan:

For Sega of America, the composers initially used a piece of software called SEGA Music Development System, which was designed by Artech Studios, but it was replaced after about a year by another piece of software called GEMS (Genesis Editor for Music and Sound effects), which was designed by Recreational Brainware and Neuromantic Productions. The program worked like a basic MIDI editor, and users could either create their own instruments or select from the premade instruments that came with the software.

Sega of Japan used a wider variety of sound drivers. Early on there were two main drivers; one was designed by Kazuhiko Nagai and used the system's Z80 processor, while the other was designed by an unknown programmer (possibly Hiroshi Kawaguchi) and used the 68000. After about a year the composers began to make use of the SMPS (Sample Music Playback System) driver. Like the earlier drivers there were two main branches of SMPS, with one designed by Tokuhiko Uwabo (and later revised by Yoshiaki Kashima) that mainly used the Z80, and another designed by Hiroshi Kubota that used the 68000; both drivers were used to roughly equal degrees at first, but over time the Z80 became the prevalent driver as games became more complex and greater demands began to be placed on the 68000. To utilize these drivers, the composers wrote in Music Macro Language on a PC-9801 computer. Then the music was assembled on the Genesis for playback.

Fortunately, both pieces of software have had their source code dumped and preserved online for download.

On his own works, Yuzo Koshiro composer music using his own MUCOM88 tool for NEC PC-88 and converted his own music files to modified version of SMPS 68000.

Sega CD

For their Sega CD titles, the composers at both the America and Japan branches pre-sequenced their music using their preferred set-ups, and then placed the finished music on the CD. The only real difference was that the America branch generally used the Redbook CD audio format, while the Japan branch placed them on the disc as PCM files. SMPS was still used by the Japanese branch, as well as GEMS by American branch, but generally only for sound effects.

At Sega Interactive division, Steven Lashower reprogrammed his Advanced Music Processor (AMP) music player and used it for Eternal Champions game.

32X

For their first 32X title, Doom (32X), Sega of America used GEMS, which didn't support the 32X's additional sound capabilities. They later contracted Brian Schmidt to create a special 32X driver that fully utilized all of the add-on's capabilities.

Sega of Japan continued to make use of both the Z80 and 68000 versions of SMPS, modified to support the 32X's extra features. Unlike their Genesis titles, where the Z80 version had become prevalent by this time, the 68000 version appears to have been the more commonly-used one for their 32X titles, likely because the main game engine typically ran on the system's two SH-2 CPUs, leaving the 68000 largely untouched and better-equipped than the Z80 to handle the new sound hardware.

On Star Wars Arcade, composers of Sega Interactive used updated version of Steven Lashower's Advanced Music Processor (AMP).

GBA

On most of their games, audio was outsourced to Wave Master. They've composed music using Nintendo's MP2K sound driver.

Audio Personnel

Japan

USA

Links

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