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My main TV is an old and busted CRT with one nonfunctional speaker. Obviously, I have the Wii set to Mono sound.

However, when playing Super Mario World on the Wii via Virtual Console, I'm still missing one stereo channel. It's very obvious that this is the problem; stereo sound effects for things like pipe travel and the end-of-level iris are simply half missing, and some harmony and melody lines in some of the music are gone as well.

It seems as though the Virtual Console doesn't respect your Wii sound setting. I can find no references to this problem on the entire web (presumably because most modern gamers aren't troglodytes with busted TVs).

Can anyone confirm this problem? Is there a solution?

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  • Ah, sorry, I misread and thought the TV was set to mono, not the wii. In that case I am unsure of the answer.
    – en1gmatic325
    Jul 6, 2011 at 6:07

2 Answers 2

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+100

The Wii VC games technically shouldn't obey the Wii sound settings because each game is suppose to be a direct port which is ran on top of an emulator. To my knowledge, the hardware for most (if not all) of the consoles that are emulated on the Wii did not have a stereo/mono option.

Instead, the Mono/Stereo output was controlled and toggled from within each game. As an example, I seem to recall the Final Fantasy games for the SNES had these settings in their options from within the game play menu.

I never played Super Mario World much as a kid (didn't own a SNES :( ) but Nintendo has always tried to spot-light the quality of their new hardware by the release of a few games that integrated most of the new technologies provided by their new hardware.

I think the SNES was the first Nintendo console to use stereo sound. Since, SMW had stereo sound, I doubt there was a way to cut if off because Nintendo would have wanted to show off the systems audio capabilities.

SOLUTION

Sorry for taking so long to respond to this with, um, an actual solution but there is a hardware way to fix this.

Plug your left and right audio RCA cables (which I assume you are using) into an RCA splitter. You can then plug your one cable into your working TV channel and you will get both audio channels to play through the one speaker.

Here is an example of what you are looking for. As you can see, these things are dirt cheap, and if shipping isn't an option, you can probably find one in a local Walmart, Target, RadioShack (or international equivalent.)

I actually have a couple of these splitters and they were necessary in my childhood because I only had a mono-input TV in my gaming room. I actually daisy-chained some of them because I had a bunch of gaming systems as a kid and I didn't have a multi-input box. To much daisy-chaining will degrade the quality of the sound, but I'm guessing with your setup that's not going to be an issue.

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    I don't buy that. Of course the SNES emulator will only support stereo sound, but the emulator runs on top of the Wii system software. If I run snes9x on my PC, snes9x will output stereo sound, but Windows will then output the sound to my speakers in whatever way I've configured it to. Having the Wii's SNES emulator not behave the same is clearly an oversight or deliberate omission, not a technical necessity.
    – 75th Trombone
    Aug 12, 2011 at 22:32
  • @75thTrombone That's one way an emulator can interact with the hardware it runs on. This answer is saying that Nintendo chose to have VC titles work this way. (Also, the Wii doesn't have an OS like a PC does: it stops running when a game is launched, and gives over all hardware control to the game and whatever Wii "operating system" hardware-control libraries it was compiled with. There is no underlying, persistent OS. Other consoles are designed differently—notably, the XBox 360 does have a persistently-running OS under the games.)
    – SevenSidedDie
    Sep 18, 2012 at 20:19
  • @SevenSidedDie I agree that this is how it is in reality, but the answer says it "technically shouldn't" work my way due to the definition of an "emulator", which is what I don't buy. A better answer, which I only just now thought of, is that some SNES games DO have Stereo/Mono settings, so to have special cases for some games to honor the Wii setting and some to honor their own would be confusingly inconsistent behavior.
    – 75th Trombone
    Sep 19, 2012 at 4:21
  • @75thTrombone That would make a good answer, yeah. I read "shouldn't" in the context of "supposed to be a direct port" rather than "because: emulator", so clearly there's enough ambiguity for there to be room for misunderstanding.
    – SevenSidedDie
    Sep 19, 2012 at 4:36
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Months later, when responding to a comment on this answer, it finally occurred to me: some SNES games have in-game Stereo/Mono controls.

Final Fantasy III (VI) had many, many options. Stereo/Mono sound, seen here, was one of them.

They couldn't very well have observed the Wii's setting when some games have one of their own. Or, well, they could have, but it would yield confusing or inconsistent behavior. Nintendo chose consistency, and so it just happens that people in my very rare situation are screwed with less optiony games, like Super Mario World.

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    And, this is exactly what I said in my first paragraph-- the option is most likely (and should be) located within the game, if that is what the original contained. Sorry if I seem a little agitated-- I just got a down vote and I said the same thing. :/
    – RLH
    Oct 9, 2012 at 12:20
  • I do not know how I missed that in your original answer. I must have literally skipped over the last part of that first paragraph every single time I read it. Or else I didn't think through the implications the first time I read it, and never fully read it all the way through again. I'm so, so sorry. My vote is locked in, but if you edit your answer I'll be able to change it back to an upvote. You might add a bit to make it more explicit that my original wish would cause usability problems. I've remarked yours as the correct answer. I'm really, really sorry.
    – 75th Trombone
    Oct 9, 2012 at 17:27
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    I italicized the portion of my post that mentions this. Lol, I find it interesting that it looks like you've taken a screen cap of either FF II or FF III, and I mentioned that these settings were in the Final Fantasy games.
    – RLH
    Oct 9, 2012 at 17:59
  • I know, right? I was like "I need an example." And I thought Super Metroid had the setting, but it didn't. So then I thought "I need a game with a ton of options" and Final Fantasy III was the first thing I thought of.
    – 75th Trombone
    Oct 10, 2012 at 4:43

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