This sounds amazing on headphones. That panning is perfect. I don't know how to describe the feeling of listening to the piano-like sounds in stereo, it's something else.
As someone who had a sega over a snes growing up this hits me right in the nostalgia, the sega genesis sound chip is part of my soul at this point aha.
Sounds very clean, especially the flute like sounds, overall, pretty darn good. Per my humble request and now for your ultimate test that no one in the entire world has done: Please do Actraiser II Sega Genesis Remix, this is where snes will always excel at, overall synthesized quality sounds, orchestra hits. Far as direct carbon copy, in regards in overall synthesized quality sounds, the Genesis in general could absolutely never achieve this, no matter how hard the remixer tries, it will never, ever come close to the original, not even close. If you search for: Actraiser II Sega Genesis remix, there is not one, 0, and a very good reason why, its saying, whoever attempts it, good luck at it, you will need it. Granted, the Sega Genesis rendition, if done properly, will still sound amazing, however in terms of overall synthesized quality sound, this where snes will always reign at, not up for debate here, another good example: FFIV - Within the giant ost. Another exteremely challenging to do a remix on for the sega genesis, Super Famicom Jrpg game: Down the world - Mervil's Ambition, in this game, there is something thats extremely rare for a 16-bit game, within the main intro, soon as you turn on the game, along with the main intro song, it is also has the actual voices involved, although still very clear to hear but its kinda muffled down a bit, but I was like wow, this is very amazing for an Super Famicom title, snes also excels in overall vocal quality over the sega genesis by a siginficant margin, sega genesis never really had good overall vocal quality, there were only a few genesis titles where the vocals in general were somewhat clean, but if anyone looking for an extreme sega genesis remix challenge, try this game, try to make the vocal quality, equally as good as the Super Famicom counterpart. That being said, love both systems, both have pro's and con's. Long live the Apple ][e (1978), 8-Bit Sega Master System, 8-Bit Nes, 16-Bit Snes & 16-Bit Sega Genesis. Would love to hear your Actraiser II renditions, thanks.
Sega Genesis can sample at a maximum quality of 32kHz, the main problem was always the ROM and RAM space of the Z80, so it depended a lot on each sound driver on the way it was programmed in the Z80 to play PCM samples. For example, the Japanese sound drivers like SMPS, CUBE, Capcom and almost all of them are quite bad in that sense but GEMS was the best in that sense of all, just listen to Global Gladiators and Dune ll which have quite clean voices and are games that They barely weigh 1MB considering that PCM samples in Genesis consume too much space as if it were the end of the world, it is possible to put fairly clean vocals in Genesis but it would obviously consume too much space.