NES style sound effects

For the best experience, disable music and play it with EGA Doom!

Doom NES SFX release 2

It is a mixture of synthetic sound effects and sampled ones for player and monster voices (in their proper muffled NES quality). I designed the synthetic ones myself, so I didn't just rip sounds from Contra or anything. I especially like the chainsaw and door sounds!

What the...
You should call it "DooM: HARSH NOISE Edition".

EDIT: that's weird. When I play sounds in XWE, they sound nice. But in the game I hear only SSSHSHSHSSHSSSHSSSSSSS. (I use prboom-plus)

I've only tested them with zDoom where they sound fine. The synth ones are in 22khz 16-bit mono, while the sampled sounds are 11khz. Might have something to do with that?

Most likely due to not being in the Doom sound format. Are they wavs?
To convert it to the Doom sound format, they need to be 8-bit.


EDIT: Just played it, quite a nice job, I must say! They sound very authentic to the NES. Did you use Famitracker or something like that to make these sounds? I think I may try to make an NES palette mod for this (ega's palette was quite different than the NES's)

Regardless, best played with this: http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?id=12650

Figures. I'll get the sounds converted to 8-bit. Edison only has 16-bit and 32-bit though... So I'll need to find an alternative editor.

The samples were processed through Famitracker. I did the others in FLStudio. Would have done it all in Famitracker, but in FL I can layer the original sounds while working which is useful for timing the new sounds right, like the shotgun blast and reload.

Use Slade to convert them to Doom format.

GeckoYamori said:

Figures. I'll get the sounds converted to 8-bit. Edison only has 16-bit and 32-bit though... So I'll need to find an alternative editor.

The samples were processed through Famitracker. I did the others in FLStudio. Would have done it all in Famitracker, but in FL I can layer the original sounds while working which is useful for timing the new sounds right, like the shotgun blast and reload.

Don't get an alternate editor; get a converter that works. The converter should be able to handle the 16->8, and then you can keep on authoring in the tools your comfortable with.

(Offhand, I don't know what converter would be best: maybe SLADE? Deutex can't do it.)


As an aside, I wouldn't be against coding WAV support for prboom-plus, except that the riff-wave format has been "extended" so many times that reading it is a very non-trivial exercise (and even if you use someone else's wav loading library, then you're stuck with the ups and downs of that library).

I can't imagine that it would be too hard to re-export the sounds as 8-bit wavs in Audacity.

Sodaholic said:

I can't imagine that it would be too hard to re-export the sounds as 8-bit wavs in Audacity.

Unless Audacity can save natively in doom format, that doesn't solve the problem; you need to convert to doom format, not just save as 8 bit PCM.

I found Wavosaur which does batch processing to 8-bit wav, so I got em all converted now. However natt seems to suggest this won't solve Memfis' problem at all. So it's Slade I have to use then?

Edit: SLADE did the trick.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/kk2z1z

Can I provide some criticism for these sound effects? First off, you've done a very good job on them, but there are a few small issues. DSCLAW seems slightly too long, perhaps shorten it by a split second. Perhaps the tone on DSDOROPN should fade in instead of just suddenly appearing, if it faded in, it would sound closer to the original.

I'm not satisfied with DSCLAW either. I think I will just go the chicken route and downsample the original through Famitracker. I tried about 3 different white noise sounds and none sounded particularly good.

All done

http://www.sendspace.com/file/qom3l2

nice, I like it alot. good work :)

The sound effects are certainly retro sounding but they don't sound authentically NES sounding.

Sigvatr said:

The sound effects are certainly retro sounding but they don't sound authentically NES sounding.

Except that they're made with a 2A03 (nes sound processor) emulator.

Anyway, DSCLAW sounds even worse now, I think you should try to make another synth one. Should be short and harsh sounding.

Anyway, I think the door opening sound needs improvement. I modified it as an example of how I think it should sound.
http://www.mediafire.com/?k9m2ltecj57giau

All of the individual sounds are well within NES limitations. They use up to 3 channels at the very most. The illusion is broken by how Doom can play several sounds over eachother. In spite of their super-downsampled quality, you probably couldn't fit all of the dpcm samples on one NES cartridge in practice either. You could timestretch them too though, which in fact I did for the Romero speech.

That's pretty awesome, what soundfont are you using for the music?

Could you please replace the "secret found" noise with an 8-bit version as well? It's kinda unnerving when I'm playing, and suddenly hear a non 8-bit sound effect out of nowhere.

BTW I love the tin can powered chainsaw sound effect you used. Makes things a lot more lively for me.

You're missing something

Bloodshedder said:

You're missing something

Composed as "NES- style chiptunes" on impulse tracker instead of a setup actually enforced to the NES's capabilities. It probably sounds nice, I don't dispute that, but does it sound NES? Meh.

(Also, the pitch bends in D_E1M1 are missing.)

Just curious, are you planning on releasing the source to the sound effects? (nsf files or maybe famitracker files) Also, it would be really interesting to hear your take on the Doom music in NES style! :D