I'm sure many know the story of NBA Jam XXX - a build of NBA Jam for the Super Nintendo (SNES) that replaced key commentary samples with NSFW 'outtakes' taken from the rerecord session. In this post, I intend to get to the bottom of how genuine this is, and ask a few questions about the commonly accepted series of events.
Let's first look at the Nintendo Player article written by the person who received the original ROMS(some mildly offsensive language), in which there seems no doubt that some of the material is genuine, at least, there seemed to be outtakes recorded in the arcade sessions. A couple of points to correct in Jon Hey's reminiscences though - NBA Jam actually used ADPCM for the sound rather than the CVSD chip which was abandoned before the Y Unit finished production, and the Get that shit outta here sample is in the EEPROMS in its censored form (with the bleep),as an alternative take that just says Get that outta here!, and with the original 'shit' as a separate sample, not connected. In order, a sample could be created, but there is no call in code to any form of these, so they are left unused. (One for TCRF for those people who want to do the writeup...)
The problem with this is, it seems that the audio in the SNES games is not that from the arcade sessions, so the outtakes that feature in that game can't have this apparent source. An example, taking the famous 'Boomshakalaka':
Aside from the Arcade sample being compressed to the extreme (it seems the ADPCM has to be VERY loud to fight the FM synth), it's hard to see much in common here. The two files are different in length and wave form, suggesting two very different takes. While Acclaim and Iguana had access to the arcade sound samples, it seems they didn't use them. (NOTE: In the Mega Drive/Genesis version of the original NBA Jam, the arcade sounds are used, resampled to 8KHz and played through the DAC, as the cartridge was larger in capacity and didn't need any fancy tricks. This would suggest that any edits were made for space reasons, to get a clearer sound out of the SNES audio hardware). The effect in the SNES version is to slightly speed it up, and go for brightness of tone rather than all out volume, making the announcer sound more exuberant. This is not just a slight increase in speed of the original take however, as slowing this sound to the original speed would still show a mismatch in shape.
The NSFW outtakes match these latter waveforms in style and processing, suggesting if there was a second session just for the SNES, they were done here. The question we have to ask, therefore, is if Tim Kitzrow was involved in a recording session for the home console versions, or is this all the work of a soundalike? It is interesting to note that, when the Tournament Editions came out, which both used much more by way of audio, both Sega and Nintendo versions use these higher pitched alternate takes, suggesting only one sound package was made.
As part of the testing process of the Williams OKI Editor I'm producing, I'm making a version of the NBA Jam TE sound ROMS using the samples from the SNES Tournament Edition game to see if there is an obvious difference after the full compression process. I will update with the results. So far, what I've noticed is that to compete with the in game music, the commentary has to have the gain turned up so high it's beyond the clipping range. The samples seem to be a mix of resampled original audio, and these rerecords. Perhaps a short session was booked to fill around some poor quality audio (with the compression, sibilance is a real issue), but it is easy to tell the difference.
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