My girl is Japanese and the moment that she heard me playing Frogger she started to sing this song. Amidar also has a Japanese tune for the bonus level. I'm pretty sure the name Amidar is derived from the bonus level in this game which is taken from some various gambling game in Japan.
The name Amidar is derived from a lottery thing which we have here in Hong Kong as well so it's probably an Asian thing. Here at least we don't use it for gambling most of the time. It's more used in stuff like a prize lottery in a birthday party or something.
Frogger Music Download
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The song, "Inu no Omawarisan" ("The Doggy Policeman"), isn't owned by Sanrio, but it is a copyrighted piece of music written in 1960, according to Japanese Wikipedia (until reading that just now, I'd thought it was old/traditional along the lines of "Mary Had a Little Lamb," but it seems it's pretty recent). Frogger actually uses several pieces of copyrighted music, including four opening title themes from then-current TV anime series. I talked about this in more detail in this post last year in the AtGames 2016 Flashbacks thread, which was an extension of this earlier post I'd written in the same thread, on Araiguma Rascal/Rascal the Raccoon's opening tune being in Frogger; since all these pieces of music were from different sources, it seems unlikely that Konami did this with permission. All these songs being owned by different entities is why modern-era re-releases/remakes of Frogger don't use the arcade music.
This isn't entirely unlike how the first Pole Position race track copied the real-life Fuji Speedway (no relation). Using the lay-out of a real-life race track is not necessarily a problem (I don't think you can copyright the shape of a road), but borrowing a real-life name without permission will raise lawyers' eyebrows. Namco did it again in Pole Position II, modeling and naming the hardest track after the real-life Suzuka Circuit. Nowadays, ports and official emulations of those games call them the Namco and Wonder tracks.
From the moment you press start Frogger plays a steady stream of music -- 26 different song fragments in all. You have to beat the first five levels and die to play them all! But even then there is one song you can never hear all the way to finish. The timer runs out before the main game song finishes. And even if you stop the timer (which I'll show you how to do) you still won't hear the complete song. There is a bug in the song data that shuts off the song's harmony voice near the end.
Most sound effects fall into one of two categories: one-shot and ongoing. A one-shot sound is the audio record of an event. Examples include a laser firing, a frog jumping, and an alien exploding. These effects take a fraction of a second, and the code simply starts them and lets them run to completion.
An ongoing effect is the continuous sound of a game object. Examples include a racecar motor, a falling bomb, and a mother-ship traversing the screen. These effects usually take longer than a second and are often continuous. The code starts them up and stops them manually when the game object is removed.
Sound effects evolve over time. Imagine the quarter-second sound of an alien exploding. The effect starts loud and decays away to nothing by the end. The effect itself is mostly white noise (a random spread of frequencies), but the average frequency of the noise decays with time as well. The game code must change the volume and frequency of this effect from start to finish, which may not seem like a big deal. But a quarter of a second is a long, long time in the code world.
Music is the most complex sound effect of all. Musical notes are played at precise frequencies with precise timing. Unless you are coding up an ice-cream truck notes are not justpure sine waves that start and stop abruptly. Notes have complex waveforms with inherent harmonics (trumpets and flutes sound very different when playing the same note). Notes have volume envelopes; an instrument attacks a note hard but the note slowly (or quickly) fades with time.
Music usually plays as multiple notes (instruments) at the same time (harmony). Different instruments also play different rhythms of notes at the same time. For instance, a base groove running beneath a main melody.
There are usually limited sound resources. Only so many effects can be playing at any one time. When a sound effect needs to be played the code must look at what sound effects are currently playing and decide whether to preempt one or to ignore the new sound effect. Can a continuous sound (like music) be interrupted momentarily and then restarted? Resource scheduling is tedious. Sound effects are not something that is just added to the code later as to spice it up. Sound is an integral part of the code from the beginning.
Most arcade games use a dedicated sound board with its own CPU and sound-effect code. The main game board sends requests to the sound board to start/stop effects. The sound board decides which effects have what priority and how to schedule simultaneous sounds. The sound board manages all the simultaneous effects as the sounds evolve over time. The sound board processes music scripts.
Early arcade sound hardware provided a number of channels -- one channel for single playing sound effect. The hardware allowed the code to change the frequency and the volume of the channels independently.
The General Instruments AY-3-8910 sound chip was popular in arcade games and computers in the 80's. A single chip provides three independent channels. A sound board often used multiple AY chips. You have heard the AY voices in classics like 1942, Frogger, burger Time, Journey, Jungle Hunt, Scramble, Spy Hunter, Time Pilot, Tron, and Two Tigers to name a few.
The voices have independently controlled frequencies. But the NOISE base frequency is controlled with a separate register. NOISE can thus be played through multiple voices, but the frequency is the same on all of them.
Each voice has an independent volume control register. The chip also has one complex volume (envelope) control circuit that can be configured to control a voice's volume. There is only one of these circuits to share among the three voices.
The envelope control has three registers to control is pattern, period, and repeating nature. A fast on/off warble that repeats is great for a firing laser sound. An envelope that dies off once is great for a gunshot (a NOISE effect). Since there is only one envelope control, it is impossible to have two sound effects using separate envelope controls at the same time.
Time Pilot uses a Z80 CPU and two AY-3-8910 chips. Moon Patrol uses a 6803 CPU and two AY-3-8910 chips. Frogger, the earliest board, uses a Z80 CPU and just one AY chip. Frogger is mostly two-voice music with a third voice for sound effects. Three voices were plenty.
Frogger and Time Pilot are both by Konami. They used similar solutions to sound. Both boards use a Switch Capacitor Audio Filter network. Each AY voice has two capacitors, 0.047uF and 0.220uF, that can be switched into the audio path. There are four possible filter capacitance configurations: none, 0.047, 0.220, or both added (0.267).
Sound evolves over time. A thread is the code that changes the volume and frequency of a single sound effect over time. At any given moment there could be several threads manipulating different simultaneous sound effects.
Frogger and Time Pilot use a common approach. For Time Pilot there are six possible threads each tied to one of the six AY channels (two chips times three voices each). If a laser-blast is assigned to thread two then channel B of AY chip 1 is dedicated to the laser-blast from start to finish. Frogger has three threads mapped to its three voices (one chip).
Moon Patrol has six voices but only four threads. As we will see shortly, Frogger and !TimePilot map threads to channels with each thread having one channel. !MoonPatrol maps individual sound effects to individual channels with a thread. A thread manages several channels.
All three sound boards are time-driven. A main loop "ticks" at regular intervals and runs all threads for a brief time. Then the loop waits for the next tick and processes all threads again. The main board interrupts the loop briefly to request a new sound command. The interrupt service looks for an available thread to start the new sound on (see below).
In Frogger and Time Pilot, the individual threads are implemented as Z80 code. Each sound effect has two routines: an initializer and a player. On the first tick of an effect the initialzer sets up the capacitors and initial states of the sound. From then on the thread calls the "player" routine on every tick. The player routine returns a flag to tell the main loop if the sound has ended or if it should continue next tick.
Moon Patrol, on the other hand, uses an interpreted language to implement the threads. Sound scripts are written in a domain-specific-language that contains jumps and subroutine calls and complex commands dedicated to sound. Why the trouble?
The pure-Z80 code requires the sound effect code to be aware of the threading. Instead of designing a sound effect from start to finish the developer has to build in return-and-come-back points in the algorithm to "give up the ball" for the other threads.
With the domain specific language, however, the sound script is developed from start to finish in a straight line without any knowledge of how/when the CPU breaks away to service the other threads. The sound algorithm is more straight-forward, but it requires the developer to learn a new (invented) language.
With the domain specific language the developer gets to focus on sound effects. The commands in the language are sound-specific. Sound developers don't have to be experts in Z80 programming. But the domain specific language requires an interpreter which eats up code space in ROM and CPU cycles when running.
The simple commands allow the MPSL program to write to a value to any register on either chip with the REGISTER. The MPSL program gives the register number and the new value. There is a command to SET_VOLUME of a voice (voices 1-6). There is a command to set the automatic DECAY_SPEED of a voice. 152ee80cbc
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