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Ed

Fun PSX Doom stuff..

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Quick email exchange between myself and Aubrey Hodges, the guy that composed the PSX Doom / Doom 64 music.

All of the ingame music was created using the Sony and Nintendo tools. Basically they allowed me to load tiny little samples into a cheesy sampler and use my sequencer to trigger the samples. Once I completed a song I saved the sample bank for use in game with the midi file. Most of the songs fit into about 170-250k of memory. Funny thing is that the bad quality gave the songs a gritty quality that made the pieces seem scary...like really underground industrial stuff. Almost all of the samples came from recordings of weird objects mic'd really close. One for instance was a bee caught in a can. I almost got stung for that song! hehe
The music you were able to rip was used only in the menu. The game was too rough on the disc to allow streaming music during the game. Which...turned out to be a good thing after all.


I managed to rip all the raw .wav samples from the PSX Doom cd. Setting up loop points and might make a sample pack for ACID/Cubase ect.. Fun stuff.

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Yeah, Kaiser was able to decipher the .lcd files back in his "The Console Doom hacking project":

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/wads-mods/38608-the-console-doom-hacking-project-console-specs/

Kaiser said:

Music in PSXDoom are ambient and spooky and is probably the best feature in PSXDoom. The music for each map are stored as .LCD files in the Music directory. Each music file contains about 2 - 3 sound samples, which those are manipulated by the .LCD file to create the music (Map02's music contains only 3 sounds! Hard to image that only these three sounds creates such a nice ambient music).


Pretty neat stuff.

I know that the track that plays in Perfect Hatred is just samples of him saying "Danny's Won" (might be "Danny's Gone", the sample is pretty degraded) played back at various speeds.

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Here's the original audio data/samples.

Link 17.4mb

Great stuff, if not for curiosity, for sequencing your own doom-esq ambient tracks in the GUI of your choice.

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I could never get past 'Limbo' on PSX DOOM. I could never manage to jump over the gap to get the yellow key.

On topic, I find what I have read quite interesting. I never knew how the PSX DOOM music was composed. Now my curiosity is satisfied. My work here is done.

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Unrelated fun PSX Doom thing: You can get it to VPO! if you go to "Suburbs" on the hardest difficulty, turn on god mode and release as many monsters as you can, then let them all concentrate and infight in one area (all the ones from the "slime pit teleports" converging on the exit area with all the imps works well)

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I've actually had a Z_Malloc error upon exiting Nirvana once. I don't know how I managed that.

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I already ripped these files sometimes ago but I don't figure where could be the "midi" files Aubrey Hodges is talking about.
Maybe in the .LCD too? You should have ask him.


edit: Are you able to rip the sequences too or to know where are
those "midi" Hodges is talking about?

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Hmm.. this reminds me...
Last year while I was hacking around PSXDOOM, I managed to actually be able to tweak with some of the notes in the music that plays throughout the levels.

Like the music in the level PLANT, I played around with it and was able to change a specific sample to another sample that plays in the song.
I noticed this raw music data was located within DOOMSND.WMD in the MUSIC directory of the PSXDOOM disc.

So, to my understanding, the LCD files are all just sample packs and I believe you can find the music "midi"-like stuff in the DOOMSND.WMD amongst a bunch of other sound info as well.

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Ed said:

Here's the original audio data/samples.

Link 17.4mb

Great stuff, if not for curiosity, for sequencing your own doom-esq ambient tracks in the GUI of your choice.

Thanks a ton for posting this, been messing around with these a bit over the past few days. :) Pretty cool stuff.

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Ed said:

Here's the original audio data/samples.

Just so you know, PSX Final Doom reuses all of the ambient music pieces and its samples used in PSX Doom. However, it also includes a few extra pieces and samples that are not found in PSX Doom. These are equally interesting to mess around with, so if you also happen to have PSX Final Doom, I have a request that they also be included. If not, well.. blast, and don't worry about getting it for it's nowhere near up to par as PSX Doom.

If I still had it, I'd grab the samples myself, but the disc split into two a few years ago. Very nice.

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Thanks for the sounds library! It´s a good resource and the quality is high enough to also use it for Doom3 or newer games.

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I guessed the DOOMSND.WMD was a library doom must have to play music.
I don't really see what this extention stand for maybe
win midi or williams midi. :-°

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Ed said:

Quick email exchange between myself and Aubrey Hodges, the guy that composed the PSX Doom / Doom 64 music.

The game was too rough on the disc to allow streaming music during the game. Which...turned out to be a good thing after all.


What does this mean exactly? Does it mean that the performance of the game would be degraded had it streamed music from the disc? The Saturn version of Doom uses (from what I can tell) the PSX soundtrack, but as redbook audio (the tracks are physically on the disc and can be played in a cd player), however, the game runs very badly. At first I assumed it was because of the sloppy job porting the game. But, is this bad performance because of the music running from the disc during gameplay instead of from memory? Very interesting.

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That can't be it. There's a number of PSX games that streamed music off the CD, and they ran quite well, and their graphics engines were more advanced than Doom's.

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Sure, for both systems, but it's just strange that Aubrey would make that comment about the PSX version's music. Also, givin the shoddiness of the port, I would not be that surprised.

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I'd have to go with the shoddy port. The saturn has two 28.6 MHz processors, 1 MB SDRAM, 1 MB DRAM, 1.5 MB VRAM, 4 KB VDP2 on-chip color RAM, 512 KB audio RAM, 512 KB CD-ROM cache, 32 KB nonvolatile RAM (battery backup), and 512 KB BIOS ROM compared to the PSX's one 33 MHz processor, Main RAM: 2 MB, Video RAM: 1 MB, Sound RAM: 512 KB, CD-ROM Buffer: 32 KB, and Operating System ROM: 512 KB .

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But how to rip the sequences as midi or mod?
I don't have any clue how the format work if only I can get
notes volume and effects...

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"too rough on the disc" could've meant that the system's cd drive was already being forced to do a lot of seeking while running the game (this sort of thing is usually why burned cds tend to shorten a dreamcast's life too) so they'd be asking too much of it by having streaming tracks as well

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all the map info gets loaded into that ram, except the music. i remember this cuz u can open your PSX during the game and play it until you finish a level, but as soon as you exit the game will freeze until you close the lid again. if it was streaming a mod, it could probly also do CDA..

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deathbringer said:

Unrelated fun PSX Doom thing: You can get it to VPO! if you go to "Suburbs" on the hardest difficulty, turn on god mode and release as many monsters as you can, then let them all concentrate and infight in one area (all the ones from the "slime pit teleports" converging on the exit area with all the imps works well)

Speaking of PSX Doom glitches...

Reproducing a "closing room" bug in PlayStation Doom:

Start on level 19, House Of Pain. [PSX Doom passwords / Level 19 map]
When you first appear on this level you'll be in a small room at the north end of the map; You'll be facing south, looking down a hallway towards a teleporter pad on the floor at the far end.

Go step on that pad, and you'll reappear in a teleporter booth near the middle of the map. Step out and enter the area just to your right. Kill the enemies here, then bring up your Automap screen.

On the Automap this room basically looks like a narrow, vertically-oriented rectangle, and the teleporter booth is just to the east. In the middle of the west edge of the room is an opening that leads out to the rest of the level.



On the Automap you'll see a pair of parallel yellow lines at that west-side opening. Walk up to the eastern-most of those two lines and try to activate it like a door or switch. (The line can be activated from either direction.)

Once activated, the room's ceiling and walls will drop down to floor level, while making a typical door-moving sound.

If you're standing under that ceiling, it will bounce off you and rise back up again temporarily. If you're outside this room and the ceiling reaches the floor, it will remain down permanently. The sides of the lowered ceiling will block access to the room, and display a darkened, scrambled surface texture.


Standing just outside the "rectangle" room, looking east. (Teleporter booth is at the far side, and off to the left.)


Same location, after the ceiling has dropped. The scrambled pattern seen above can appear to shimmer or flicker in the actual game, and will change appearance somewhat as the player moves around.

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@ED You forgot to ask Aubrey what tool did he use exactly so we can rip
complete muisic with sequence or did you have already compose music
from samples?

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DoomKn1ght said:

@ED You forgot to ask Aubrey what tool did he use exactly so we can rip
complete muisic with sequence or did you have already compose music
from samples?


Don't worry because he used a program called PSound

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I made a couple of songs with those packs and a TX81z, gritty 1980s FM synth. Goes well with the lo-fi Aubrey samples. I made a quick MS page here. I have 15 or so of these if anyone wants them for a project or whatever, I don't think I'll use them for anything.

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