CyberSound: Saturn’s Musical Middleware

SHIRO! SHOW Recap

Out of the box, Saturn offered incredible sound hardware, enabling musicians and sound designers to create complex and multi-layered tracks. It’s custom Yamaha YMF292 (aka Saturn Custom Sound Processor or SCSP) was the heart of this system, connected directly to 512KB of dedicated audio RAM and controlled by a Motorola M68000. The aural possibilities of what could be done with this hardware seemed almost limitless in 1995…

However, those that weren’t content with simply using the already robust hardware available, had the added ability of storing and playing back raw audio samples and even running custom sound software from that dedicated audio RAM. Capcom’s QSound and InVision’s CyberSound were both excellent examples of such software that could be used to great effect in creating a more lush soundscape to help set a game apart from the competition.

CyberSound Logo

As part of the official Sega Saturn development tools, Sega licensed the “CyberSound GM”, a combination MIDI instrument/waveform library and sound driver from InVision Interactive as a Saturn-compatible system available to third-party developers. This formed what was initially known as the “Sega Sound Library” (prior to the direct use of the CyberSound name and branding). These instrument/waveforms would be fed to the Saturn Custom Sound Processor (SCSP) and played.

CyberSound technology was used in a large percentage of Saturn games, including SEGA’s first-party games, such as NiGHTS into Dreams.., Dragon Force and Sakura Wars. NiGHTS into Dreams… (and Christmas NiGHTS) was one of the more high-profile games to famously implement CyberSound’s vast instrument library in order to create the fluid and ever-changing soundtrack based on the mood of the Nightopians…

Christmas NiGHTS’ Melody Box allows players to engage with CyberSound to a degree…

“When Sega pioneered dynamic downloadable sounds to give its game developers a virtual palette of sounds for their music and sound effect tracks, we needed a partner who could provide the most musical sounds for Saturn. We chose to license CyberSound musical instruments for the Saturn and future game platforms because of InVision’s outstanding reputation in both the musical instrument and computer industries.” -Stephen Payne, Senior VP, SegaSoft

Several Sega Dreamcast games also make use of CyberSound technology, though were less likely to advertise the then-aging system as Saturn titles were.

Did you know that CyberSound was also released in the form of a home audio production sequencer, enabling you to make your own CyberSound formatted PCM tracks? In addition to previous iterations of the CyberSound Studio software, in December of 1997, InVision Interactive released full package, including a small keyboard synthesizer.

CyberSound Studio 3.0
PC Software: Download
MAC Software: Download