The popular opinion on Genesis vs SNES sound

I can't even think about programming right now, but I'm not tired enough to fall asleep, so...

Anyway, I remember tokumaru saying that he prefers the sound of the Genesis over the SNES, which surprised me, because I've never heard anyone say that who wasn't a diehard Sega fanboy. Whenever people bring up the old Genesis vs SNES debate, they act like the SNES was leagues ahead in this category (but then would struggle with the graphics? That seems like a bigger improvement to me.) The worst the Genesis would do is make farting noises, but at least they didn't sound like they were being played through a plastic bag. The instrument selection is perhaps even the bigger problem, with many sounding like they were taken directly from Mario Paint. I still prefer the sound of the SNES over the Genesis overall, but it's only because voice samples and complicated sound effects on the Genesis are often ear splittingly bad, and the minority (but still decently sized) of SNES games that have good sounding music sound really good, like the Donkey Kong Country games that I don't see how the Genesis could reasonably replicate the audio of.

I'd really like to know what you could do with the SNES audio wise if the SPC700 didn't exist, although I don't know if the CPU would have trouble writing to audio ram. It burns me how people say the SNES's audio hardware was "far more advanced because of Sony's sound chip". To me, it's money that could have been used better elsewhere.

This has already been debated over and over. I see no reason to debate it yet again. First, the SEGA console you're talking about is called Mega Drive. Genesis is/was a pop band (and a very good one by the way !).

However, no matter how much worse they sounds, I think the phase modulation-based sound chips much more interesting on the technical level, and they allow the programmers to do more trickery with them. I managed to download a soft synth that uses no 4 but 8 operators and it simulates most instruments greatly (there's also more "options" available than in the Mega Drive's sound chip.

I with I could find a real synth that is a bit like the Yamaha DX-7 but more modern, at least partially General MIDI compatible, and with fully customizable modulation-based patches. Does such a thing even exist ?


Have you seen his avatar ? How could he NOT be a SEGA fanboy ? He just thinks it's possible to be both a SEGA and a Nintendo fanboy, and I do not see why that wouldn't be possible.

It's not that I always find the Genesis sound better, but I generally do. SNES sound bothers me when it's too muffled, which happens quite often. There are some fantastic soundtracks on the SNES, of course, but when the low quality of the samples is absurdly obvious, it distracts me a lot. Genesis sounds may feel repetitive after a while, but the crispness of it is something I really appreciate.


I've heard that some games on the Genesis don't use the Z80 at all, and just have the 68000 take care of the sound as well, such as Sonic 1.

I'm definitely a fan of both consoles, but I don't like the term fanboy... To me, "fanboy" sounds like someone who blindly defends something just because it's the thing that they like most, without acknowledging its flaws and that the competition may have the upper hand in some areas.

It can't be argued that the SNES has better graphical capabilities than the Genesis, whose only real advantage is the higher horizontal resolution of 320 pixels (which does make a difference in some games). I can't say anything conclusive about the CPU clock issue, because I can't program the 68000 or the 65816, but the SNES does seem a bit underpowered. SNES wins best controller I guess. Sound is not a clear win for either side IMO, since both consoles can do things the other can't. It's true that the SNES can sound more realistic, but that kinda goes down the drain when the sounds appear to be coming out of a telephone. Genesis has more consistent quality across different games, and that's something I appreciate.

I don't tend to use hardware for synthesis much for a long time now (I have keyboard MIDI controllers, but usually do synthesis through software and ASIO), but I really liked the NI FM7 software synthesizer, which is basically an expanded DX7 idea. (There's an NI FM8 sequel, but it lost the whole DX7 look and theme to the interface, which made me sad.)


As far as Genesis vs SNES, I think sample based sound hardware doesn't have much personality of its own, it just takes on the character of the samples used. FM, on the other hand, makes its mark on what you're doing. (Then again, maybe someone could think FM was boring cause it was used in so many arcade machines...)

However, I also think FM is very hard to use, and most Genesis soundtracks are of poor quality. I think the are a lot more good SNES soundtracks than good Genesis soundtracks, even though I like the Genesis hardware better. There are some really amazing Genesis soundtracks, though. Shinobi III is my favourite.

Also, there's a curious phenomenon that I think a lot of SNES soundtracks are largely using samples of FM synthesizers. Mario All-Stars, for example.


So anyhow, I don't really care if one is "better" than the other; I just like to listen to their soundtracks, and both had some great ones. If you forced me to write music for one of them, I probably pick the Genesis, because The SNES is "boring" to write for. It's no much more than a MOD player with harsh memory limitations and a few strange quirks, but working with FM I feel like the synthesizer has input on the music, and will shape the sound of what I do on it. The Genesis also having 3 square channels on top adds a bit of special "chiptune" flavour too.

Of course, in professional situation you don't really get to pick your platform. That's chosen ahead of time by various business decisions, and you make music with what you're given.

Just for fun, here's a bad game and a good game for both systems, all in broadly similar musical genres. I make no warranties regarding these isolated samples being in any way representative of the libraries as a whole:

SNES - RPM Racing and its sequel Rock 'N' Roll Racing
Mega Drive - Rock 'N' Roll Racing (keep in mind it cuts out any time it has to play a PCM sample) and the completely unrelated Thunder Force IV (which, uh, also cuts out for PCM samples, or would if that wasn't an omake track)


Tim Follin was pretty good at that. He's known for Solstice on the NES and stuff like Plok, Arcade's Revenge and (yes) Rock 'N' Roll Racing on the SNES*, but Time Trax demonstrates that he was just as good on the Mega Drive.

Yuzo Koshiro is another good one. I think he's known more for Mega Drive games, for example the Streets of Rage series, but he also did Super Adventure Island.

*All three of those games were done together with his brother Geoff.

It really depends on the game, in both cases. Programming samples and programming a phase-modulation chips both aren't easy if you want to push the system to its limit, so in both cases the majority of games are going to sound bad while a minority is going to take advantage of the system's possibilities and sound good.


It would be worst since games would update their audio engines at 60Hz instead of doing it faster. (the probability they'd go through the trouble to program a timer to update at a faster rate is low). For music it doesn't change much but for sound effects it does, the fast update rate of SNES sound engines caused me quite a few problems when I had to port it to the Game Boy Advance for Final Fantasy 4-6.

Also the PlayStation 1 is in a similar situation - a S-DSP like sound chip but with no dedicated sound CPU.


I agree, and he's the one who came with that term.


It looks interesting but I really don't like the software synthesizers. The concept is nice but it's not practical to play with your keyboard and mouse, and the whole point of playing music is to do something *else* than sitting in front of a computer or TV (at least for me). Using software synthesizers kills that point.
It looks like the Clavia Nord Modular is interesting in this regard, but it's discontinued (but is still much more recent than the epic DX7). I'll have to see if I can order one used and if they're affordable.


Both Super Mario World and Super Mario All-Stars seems to use an extremely limited sample collection designed to occupy very few memory. I wouldn't use this as an indication, even approximate, to how the SNES can sound. It'd be like having a MegaDrive game who uses mostly the PSG for all its music and barely uses FM, and call that an example of how the MegaDrive sounds (I don't know if such a game even exists).

It has a Yamaha synth chip, so there is no "selection", you can create almost any instrument with it.

But of course Sega cheaped out and didn't license any, and creating those is a bit of a special discipline.

So how does Snes's BRR compare to ADPCM?

I had both systems (SNES and MD) when i was young and at this time i preferred by a large margin the SNES sound which was just more realist and modern for me. Later when i connected a headphone on the MD1 audio jack i completely rediscovered the Megadrive sound and was really impressed by Street of Rage 2 and Sonic 2 tunes for instance, to the point i recorded them on tape ^^
In fact i would say the SNES generally sound better, because it's easy to make it sounds nice... on the other hand it's very easy to make the MD to sound really bad making your ears bleed. But if the SNES generally sounds good, i think it's quite difficult to make it sound very good, mainly because of the short amount of memory allocated for samples and also because of the compression / filtering applied in the sound process and that you can't disable. For instance Castlevania 4 is one of those game which have wonderful music compositions but which is really lowered by the poor sample quality... In the end, when it comes of having the best sound quality or simply the best musics to listen with headphone, I generally tend to think the Megadrive is better than the SNES (best MD tunes sounds better than best SNES tunes imo), still i know that is a subjective point of view...

Another awesome TF4 Omake :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foB-zVZSwTM
And one from Dragon's Fury :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itrTGE-1EJU

Technosoft we're damn good using the FM chip, too bad their PCM driver sucks so much...

I guess there must have been a terrible misprint, because my console and all my games for it say "GENESIS".


Less powerful than the 68000, but I think that's the least of the SNES's issues.


Even though I wasn't the one who called him that?


I thought you would be able to transfer more data in the same amount of time without the SPC700. You know, what times can you write to audio ram? I doubt there's anything like vblank because the DSP would need full time access.

Is anyone interested in covering Genesis (1983) on the Mega Drive's sound chip the way rainwarrior covered Dark Side of the Moon on the 2A03?


One way to assess it is to listen to games that came out on both systems. Zoop sounds better on Super NES, for instance.


Then buy a MIDI controller.


BRR is a form of ADPCM. If you're referring to IMA ADPCM as used on the Nintendo DS, they're about the same: encode the 4-bit difference between the current sample and the previous one, with some means to adjust the overall volume.


I think Bregalad's implication is that more Mega Drive consoles were shipped outside the North American market than Genesis consoles inside it.


The audio RAM runs at 3 MHz. Instead of two time slots for the DSP and one for the S-SMP, what you suggest would amount to two for the DSP and one for the memory copy interface. But even a 1 MHz interface would be too slow for a DMA copy at 2.7 MHz, and it would have encouraged programmers to update frequencies at 50 or 60 Hz even more than they already did.

Filling the sound RAM with the 65816 is still a lot faster than waiting for the SPC700 to store the bytes you send it.

Using indirect HDMA to send data to the APU ports could be very light on the S-CPU, if rather time-consuming on the S-SMP... Unless I've misunderstood how indirect HDMA works, updating the table each frame should be pretty quick.

Your big audio streaming project happens to use regular DMA during the frame, so you can't do this because of the 1/1/1 bug. But from the S-CPU's perspective it's effectively half-speed DMA to audio RAM (the overhead roughly matches the actual transfer time at 4 bytes per line indirect). N-Warp Daisakusen does HDMA streaming at 4 bytes per line, and I think the APU-side code could be sped up considerably with careful attention to synchronization.

Still, it remains significant that apparently no one did this during the commercial lifetime of the system (apparently even ToP and SO use manual CPU writes)...

I wouldn't call BRR a form of ADPCM as it doesn't store differences of samples but samples directly, with scaling and filter parameters.

Now as far as sound itself goes, I have been listening through the soundtracks of various machines and picking out the good stuff.
I can see why lot of people think MD sound is garbage, most games developed in USA used really unpleasant and abrasive sounds, bad enough it made me think how these were even allowed to be released.
Japanese developed games tended to sound good or great, but there were plenty stinkers too, and most EU developed games had very good sound overall, great compositions and great sounds. I ended up picking out around 100 soundtracks I considered good/great, around as much as I picked out for NES and PCE.
I only started with going through the SNES soundtracks so I don't have much overview on it yet. So far I have heard a lot of garbage with really bad samples but a few nice things too, still over 1000 soundtracks more to go, it is gonna take a while haha.

If you have a MIDI controller you don't really need to interact with your computer except to turn it on and set it up. If your controller has enough knobs you can program patches and everything via that, too. With ASIO you can get very low latency, which was basically why I stopped owning hardware synthesizers, it solved the last remaining problem I cared about.

If you really need to have your synthesis in its own box, I think the last one Yamaha made was the FS1R but that was 20 years ago and they're rare now, much easier just to get a DX7. I'm sure there's a bunch of modern ones that can do some form of FM though. A while ago I spent some time with an Access Virus, which had some FM capabilities, and I thought it was quite nice (also expensive though, it was not my own).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGWSijvWxFI
I immediately thought of Sonic Spinball. (Particularly the options music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGWSijvWxFI)


It's a shame, often times, you'll hear a song that's really good until they throw in a really bad sample that throws it off. I know I've said this 100 times before, but the Donkey Kong Country games are probably the cleanest you'll find. I really like "Rockface Rumble" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qntu2QvHQRE) from DKC3. Had I never played the game before, I wouldn't have ever guessed that track was from the SNES. It's one of the few examples of where the drums still hit hard despite being down sampled (I don't know how much though) and filtered.

Oh yeah, one particular type of music on the SNES I really don't like is the stuff in Capcom's later SNES games. I like the composition in Megaman X2 and X3, but the electric guitar type sound is terrible, and not even because of quality.

In the terminology of BRR, IMA likewise stores samples directly, with a constant filter pred[t] = 1.0 * out[t - 1], and it infers the scaling based on the previous samples.


Which in turn, as calima pointed out, is because "Sega cheaped out and didn't license any" high-quality patch libraries to its authorized developers in North America.

This is only true for filter 0. Filter 1 does store difference of samples, and filter 2 and 3 something even more complex.



So basically, IMA-ADPCM works similarly to BRR but do not use blocks with a header specifying filter and shift range ? Sounds interesting.

With IMA-ADPCM, the amplitude of the deltas varies continuously with the signal, meaning it adapts itself during encoding/decoding. You can look how it works, but basically the delta "gain" grows when deltas are at the extreme values (nibbles 7 or F) or near them, but slowly decreases when it's not. The adaptative part of the algorithm part then become clear: it tries to adjust the gain continuously so it's big enough to avoid slope overload distortion but also small enough to reduce quantization noise.

Because of this, it does not need headers to chunks of data to specify gain, as the gain is determined from the audio data itself, and there's no filters to simplify the implementation: the predictor is simply y[0] = y[-1]; that is, an accumulator.

Sounds very clever, however the major problem is that it's impossible to have random access and to play the sound you're forced to decode it from the beginning. With BRR, samples should be looped by hardware so obviously this wouldn't have been possible with IMA. However the BRR looping stability is not always guaranteed, and some games abuse this (to generate white noise).

http://problemkaputt.de/fullsnes.htm#sn ... brrsamples

I'm not seeing any mention of filter modes 1, 2 and 3 treating the samples as anything more than direct 4bit value + shift to form final 15bit sample that then gets mangled up with previously mangled values.
If there was an offset value somewhere so samples in each each block gets pushed around relative to previous it would start resembling differences part is but there's nothing such, just crushed samples. Something along the lines "Scaled PCM" is much more accurate.

The key part of any DPCM is the predictor. The operation is simple: when encoding, the predictor tries to predict the next sample, you then have to substract the predictor output from the actual sample to get the error sample; finally you encode the error sample (also called the residue; this is the delta in DPCM!). What is the predictor function? It can be anything, but the better predictor is the one that have the smallest error, that is, the one the most accurately predicting the signal to encode. A predictor can be as simple as y[0] = y[-1], meaning "I predict the sample to be equal to the last one output", which works well for low frequency audio data but not with high frequencies. You can be much more elaborate with your predictor, by predicting the current sample using a linear combination of the past samples; see linear predictive coding for reference.

The SPC700 DSP have a set of fixed predictors to offer. The first one is no prediction at all, the other three are simple linear combination of past samples.

I'll have to update my definition of what (A)DPCM is then. It is all in the encoder/decoder not data per se.

No. Again this is true for filter 0 only.

Filter 1 has a prediction of y[0] = 15/16 x[-1], with is almost y[0] = y[-1]. In other words, the prediction of filter 1 is to repeat the last sample (attenuating it by a 15/16 factor), and the encoded data is the delta between the last sample and the new one.

Saying that filter 1 encodes the delta between samples or saying it encodes the difference between a prediction which happens to be repeating the last sample is basically saying the same thing with different words.

Yes, it makes sense now, though the terminology used is confusing for the time being.

IMA can be looped by saving the decoder state (previous sample and scale index) when the decoder reaches the loop start and then restoring that after the loop ends. BRR doesn't have quite the pressing need to store the state because all its filters are fully (0) or partially (1+) leaky.

As for how good FM patches can be, the Roland MT32 showed that you really need a sampled Attack if you want to use FM synthesis for the rest of the instrument.

Roland was big on Linear Arithmetic synthesis, its term for sampled attack combined with subtractive sustain, once it became clear that attacks were hard to synthesize.

I think the SNES has aged pretty poorly. Its music suffers from low quality samples and the rotation/scaling/mode-7 effects look like ass.

Genesis all the way.

So it can (and will) be agrued, right ? Often when comparing systems A and B of similar generations, even if A came out a couple of years before B, it's common that A can do things that B can't, as well as B can do things that A can't. Even if there's an overall technical superiority of A over B, it will still be agrued by fanboys that B is better than a because there's this little thing B can do and A can't. So I'm sure there's people that will call the Mega Drive having better graphics due to it's higher horizontal resolution.

It's like the C64 vs NES, it's pretty much the same thing, C64 has less sound channels but they can do more than NES' channels. It has worse graphics, BUT it can colour sprites individually among the 16 available colours instead of using the concept of a "sprite palette", and can colour individual BG tiles individually instead of using the concept of BG palettes and attribute tables.

Not as poorly as the N64, but I tend to agree, a lot of mode 7 effects look like absolute crap these days.

By far the ugliest thing to me is when a game that uses a BG for the status bar just displays black underneath it for Mode 7, rather than making it out of sprites here or just making sure it never reaches the status bar. It looks good in R-Type III because the status bar always has a black backdrop. I remember playing Super Castlevania IV and figuring out something was going to happen the second I got to the rotating room, which kind of ruined it.

Oh, I noticed that in Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts! Didn't find it so bad. What really bothers me are the extreme mode 7 zooms, pixelated as fuck. The exaggerated use of gradients by artists who didn't know what to do with so many colors also irks me a lot. And of course, when the audio is so muffled it makes me feel like my head is inside a bucket.

If there's one company that always rubs me the wrong way it's Capcom, and here are the reasons:

-muffled samples
-excessive gradients
-stiff animation
-black bars
-lots of slowdown
-only 3 enemies at once

No such thing.



It's all a matter of taste, this one.

It was at least consistent there. (The flickering title wave on the first level is ugly as shit though.) I still would have preferred it if the status bar blacked out everything and not just the layer it is on. I don't know why they did that; it makes no visual sense and it's not like its difficult to spot. (Nobody was ever tricked into thinking it was another BG.) If they absolutely needed to do that, for some reason, they could have used windowing and made the background under the scoreboard fade in. This doesn't make sense either, but I'm sure it would look better.


Audio quality aside, they also suck. Unlike just about every other company, I think their music actually got worse. I don't even think Street Fighter II SNES sounds that good (the arcade version is undoubtedly the best), but Super Street Fighter 2 SNES sounds terrible.

Yeah, some of the Mode 7 pixilation is annoying though. I wonder how much of the map F-Zero is displaying, because the closer the closest part is to native resolution, the better. Shrinking looks better than scaling, in my opinion. It's actually kind of nice that the Neo Geo can only shrink sprites, because artists can't draw something really small and blow it up for a 2.5D game.


Uh, yes or no? (The whole background is a gradient, but the tiles aren't very colorful)

Street Fighter Alpha is ridiculous. Every sample was ridiculously muffled but for somehow had to reload the music after the announcer said "fight". Also, you mean to tell me Capcom never swapped out spc700 codes before?

I'm sorry; I just can't take this Mode 7 bashing seriously. Sure, it looks bad compared to what the Gamecube could do, and it could certainly be mishandled, but taking it as a reason for preferring the Mega Drive is redolent of sour grapes...

Agreed on SFA2. I believe it's mostly the voices that needed reloading (and took up a ton of ARAM once loaded), which implies that the game could have benefited massively from a fast on-demand audio streaming engine. We had a substantial discussion on this topic a while back; maybe once I get my Super FX bullet hell test running I'll put a little focus on my HDMA streaming scheme and see if it works.

I don't think mode 7 was mentioned as a reason for preferring the MD, it was just a parallel discussion.

I was referring mostly to pubby's post on the previous page, which was the point of entry for this subject and may thus be seen as providing context for the discussion. This does not imply that everybody agrees with the implication contained in his post, but so far nobody has said otherwise.

Huh ? How is that a problem ? Anyway after having played the game once you already "know" the rotating room is going to rotate so by your standards the experience is ruined systematically at each replay. I probably played SCV IV 50+ times so then my experience is even more ruined since I know every single thing about this game by heart. Finally, knowing "something is going to happen" but not knowing what is probably just as interesting, in the case where you're discovering the game for the 1st time.

Also doing this status bar with sprites (as you suggest) would make it as noticeable because they'd start to disappear as soon as another sprite would come in the same area, the SNES not being able to display more than 32 8x8 sprites per line (and larger sprites being internally converted to 8x8 sprites).


It wasn't serious, there was a troll who came with some random insults and tokumaru answered him seriously (aka "feed the troll").

Huh? Capcom came with what is highly reconized as some of the best music for the SNES for example in the Mega Man X series (but also Mega Man 7 and Mega Man & Bass), and the Breath of Fire bi-logy. You're probably the only weirdo calling that "muffled" or "horrible quality" or whatever.

The reason the audio in Street Fighter games is so bad is because they wanted to have voices, and the SPC700 is not suited for voices. In Steet FIghter II they simply had very low quality voices to take few memory (which does indeed sound "muffled" as you describe), and in Street Fighter Alpha they load them dynamically but it takes a hell of loading time and ruins the experience (which is IMO much worse than simply sounding "muffled"). I believe it would have been best to port those games without using voices at all, but that just isn't the path they took. Juding Capcom on those two games alone is ridiculous - let alone that Street Fighter Alpha doesn't even use Capcom's sound engine in the 1st place.

Why ask the question and then argue against my statement, implying you knew exactly why I thought it was a problem?


Actually, kind of. If I were to play a non-multiplayer linear game 50+ times, the challenge is just about eliminated, making it no fun. The only time I do this sort of thing is if I set a challenge for myself, like never loosing a life, or something like that.


If that's truly the case (which I don't think it is), that's not good for the SNES. It's not that the composition is bad or anything, but I hate the sound samples, not due to quality, but because of how they sound.


They could have streemed the voice samples with HDMA; I don't think that's asking too much. They'd probably be 12KHz or something like that, which is even an improvement for the voice samples.

Actually, sadly you're right. I wish we could be allowed to forgot a game almost completely and re-discover it from scratch. In my case for SCV IV I know it way too well to have nearly as much pleasure playing it. That'd be amazing. Well perhaps an answer is to play other (new) games, but...

Haters gonna hate...


What you're asking for is abusing the system's hardware on the CPU side (use graphical hardware for sound) *and* having a dedicated special program on the SPC700 side able to receive this data. This is higly nonstandard, and we're talking about Street Fighter II, which came out almost straight after the system's release. I don't think they were supposed to push the system to it's limit at that point. Also, I don't think you can possibly pretend 12kHz audio isn't muffled. If you're talking about SFA2 then I agree with you, they were supposed to push the system to it's limit since it was at the end of its life.

See, that's what I thought, but then everybody started agreeing with him...

...wait, that means...

...dammit.


What? Whose engine does it use?


Depends on your definition of "too much". As far as I know, HDMA was never used to stream audio during the commercial lifetime of the system. Even Star Ocean doesn't do it.


Using HDMA to write to the APU ports is exactly the same as using it to write to any of the PPU registers.

I can see how the fact that it was obviously designed to do graphical effects could lead someone to subconsciously ignore it when designing an audio engine, and I can certainly see how someone slightly more creative could still end up deciding that the APU-side streaming code was too big a challenge for a game with a schedule and budget to meet. But it's not like the streaming in N-Warp Daisakusen shortens the lifespan of the chipset... also, it's possible the APU ports were put on the B bus for a reason - there are even four of them, matching the maximum capacity of an HDMA channel...

I agree that expecting HDMA streaming in Street Fighter 2 is unreasonable. I'm not even sure expecting it in Alpha 2 is reasonable; then again, considering the mess the audio loader made of that game, you'd think someone at Capcom might have started casting about for ideas on how to fix it...

I think Mega Man's music is pretty good except for the electric guitar. Wild Gun from Natsume uses a similar sample library except they switched the electric guitar sample with another one.

It seems like the supervisors at Capcom wanted their programmers to reuse old code as long as they possibly can, even when it's outdated and inefficient. Every fighting game from Final Fight to Street Fighter Alpha used the same crappy VRAM and DMA management code. Let's write to DMA registers one byte at a time so we need freaking big black bars!

Believe it or not, according to my (incomplete) sound driver list, it uses Nintendo's. Bregalad may be able to clarify/correct that, since I haven't specifically looked into SFA2 before.

(The tool and signatures I use to generate that file are here. There's some probably obvious omissions, like Konami games etc. but I haven't updated this in a while)

Huh! Did any other N-SPC game have load times?

Well, in a strictly pedantic sense, they pretty much all did.

Whether any of them used a similar amount of pure data compared to SFA2 is a different question

Batman Forever seems to load a lot!!

I need to redo Bad Apple soon, but I need to come up with some form of faster compression without using DMA to fill out the tile map.

Actually I have an idea. I can decompress the tile map during vblank, directly into VRAM.

It has some glaring omissions, like the Tim/Geoff Follin sound engine.

If you mean the one in e.g. Plok, that's the Software Creations sound driver written by Paul Tonge. It was also used in a number of games that the Follins weren't involved with, including games not actually developed by Software Creations, such as Winter Gold and the unreleased Pocahontas.

There are other drivers that I'm moderately aware of, like that one, which I just haven't attempted to create reliable signatures for yet.

Hmm, interesting. Paul Tonge was pretty much the only person that made fantastic music on the Atari Lynx.