Yoshio Kobayashi

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Yoshio Kobayashi
Yoshio Kobayashi - 01.jpg
Local 小林 義男 (こばやし よしお)
Born
Birth Place Toyota-gun, Hiroshima, Japan
Nationality Japanese   Japan.svg
Aliases Y. Kobayashi

Yoshio Kobayashi is a Japanese composer and sound designer. He studied sound design with Kenji Konishi and Yasushi Utsunomiya while he was a student. In the late 80s to early 90s, Kobayashi started working at Crosstalk in Hiroshima, in which he was their main composer. While working there, he created music, sound effects, and even arranged others' music.

For over a decade, Kobayashi has served as a part-time lecturer at the Hiroshima Computer College for Music Production.

Today, while Kobayashi no longer works on video games, he continues to work with music. He works with synthesizers and also creates acoustic music. Yoshio currently plays in the band "Kami-Yagi IBM" (上八木IBM).

Yoshio's favorite bands include Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Isao Tomita.

Audio Development

MSX2/NES

For both his MSX2 and NES music, Yoshio sequenced his music, which was then given to Kazuhisa Mitani to program into the game. Kobayashi was aware of the four monophonic voices he was allowed to use, and composed/arranged his music accordingly.

At that time, the computer I used to create music data was the NEC PC8001mkII.

I forgot the name of the sequencer I was using... It must have been "Music ... (?)". It was a sequencer with an FM sound source and a PSG sound source. The FM sound source had 5 tracks + the PSG sound source with 3 tracks, in total, 8 tracks. The FM sound source allowed you to edit the tone with eight-tone polyphonic sound, one for each track.

The music for NES used only 3 PSG sound source tracks.

Yoshio later recalled the software he used as Musium, or its successor Musium 2. A video of the program working can be seen here.

SNES

Yoshio used a variant of Nintendo's Kankichi-kun sound driver. The variant may have belonged to Crosstalk, and he may have made the variant himself.

The Super Famicom could only create data on a dedicated development machine. The dedicated machine contained a sequencer, which was used to create songs. This sequencer required me to prepare my own tones. There were only basic waveforms (saw wave, pulse wave, etc.) and no instrumental voices. It had a sampling function, which samples the synthesizer sound. I sampled and stocked many tones for drums, piano, bass, etc., and used them to create sounds. The only processing of tones was an envelope generator on the volume... Anyway, it could not be processed compared to a normal synthesizer. I think it was 8-note polyphonic. I remember being surprised at the surprisingly small number of sounds. At the time, you had to have a dedicated Super Famicom console to develop games for it, so people said, "Amateurs with no money can't make Super Famicom games."

X68

For DragonStrike, Yoshio used OPMDRV which was a MML-based editor popular with X68000 games.

Gameography

Released Title Sample Notes
1988-??-?? Hacker (MSX2) (ハッカー)
1989-03-17 Bakushou!! Jinsei Gekijou (FC) (爆笑!!人生劇場)
1989-??-?? Arctic (MSX2) (アークティック)
Arranger
1990-02-23 Arctic (FC) (アークティック)
Arranger
1990-08-30 Jangou (FC) (雀豪)
Arranger
1990-11-30 Brettone Lays (X68) (ブルトン・レイ) Synthe Manipulator
1991-03-21 Hillsfar (NES) (ヒルズファー)
Arranger
1992-03-21 DragonStrike (PC98) (ドラゴンストライク)
With Yasuhiro Kawasaki.
1992-03-21 DragonStrike (X68) (ドラゴンストライク)
With Yasuhiro Kawasaki.
1992-??-?? Mah-jong (CDI) (麻雀)
1993-01-14 Burai: Hachigyoku no Yuushi Densetsu (SFC) (ブライ「八玉の勇士伝説」)
1993-10-29 Shougi Fuurinkazan (SFC) (将棋風林火山)
1994-11-25 Naruhodo! The World (SFC) (なるほど!ザ・ワールド)
1997-04-25 Sparkling Feather (PCFX) (スパークリングフェザー) Sound
Unknown Horoscope: Seiyou Senseijutsu (CDI) (ホロスコープ 西洋占星術)

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