The Famicom's Bass Had No Volume Knob

The Famicom's Bass Had No Volume Knob

Building a museum for these consoles keeps turning up things I never knew. The other day it was how the Famicom made its music.

The sound chip had five channels: two square waves, one triangle wave, one noise channel, and one that played back short recorded samples. The triangle wave usually carried the bass, and it had no volume control at all. The NESdev wiki, where programmers document this hardware, puts it plainly: "It has no volume control; the waveform is either cycling or suspended." The bass could not get louder for the big moment or softer for the quiet one. It was on, or it was off. I could not find the chip's designers explaining why they built it that way.

There was a second limit. Each channel could play only one note at a time, so no channel could hold a chord. Composers worked around that with arpeggios: one channel jumps between two, three or four notes so quickly that your ear hears a chord. For the bass, some games played the first frame of a note an octave higher or lower, which gave the note a sharper start even though its volume never changed.

My first reaction, when I read all this, was that while it works you hardly feel it. Strengths and weaknesses are just features. Whether they come alive is up to the person using them. If you only look at the bad side, that is the end of it. But so many great songs were born exactly because of these limits.