Hack28.Add Sound to Your MAME Experience
Use WAV samples to replicate the original arcade sounds .
One day not too long ago, you were thinking of Q*bert. You closed your eyes and suddenly you were back in front of the machine that used to stand in the lobby of your local pizza parlor. You put in a quarter, slammed the machine to get it to drop in, and the game started up with the familiar fanfare. You weren't just seeing the game with your mind's eye, you were hearing it, too. The "bwip," like a drip of water, as Q*bert bounces down the pyramid. The "oooooowwww" as he falls off the edge. And of course, the infamous "@!#?@!" when Q*bert was stomped by a Coily.
With these sounds playing a nostalgic symphony in your brain, you boot up Q*bert in MAME. But something's wrong. Some of the sound is gone. The familiar fanfare is there, and so is the "bwip." But the good stuff, the scream and the cursing? To heck with this emulation stuff, you think. They've missed the best parts ! But before you email the MAME creators (subject line: "@!#?@!"), ask yourself: did you download the Q*bert samples?
3.9.1. Whither Samples?
In the early days of arcade games , designers used some interesting means to produce sound effects. The eponymous "pong" that sounded when a ball bounced off the paddle in that seminal arcade hit was jury-rigged by designer Al Alcorn to be produced from parts that were already built into the machine's design.
I've seen articles written about how intelligently the sound was done and how appropriate the sound was. The truth is, I was running out of parts on the board Since I had the wire wrapped on the scope, I poked around the sync generator to find an appropriate frequency or a tone. So those sounds were done in half a day. They were the sounds already in the machine.
From The Ultimate History of Video Games by Steven L. Kent (Prima, 2001) p. 42
Pong, being entirely constructed from electronic hardware, contains no ROM code and therefore cannot be emulated in MAME. But even some games for which the graphic and gameplay data was coded on chips in ROM format, the sound effects were done using analog electronics. Furthermore, the coders of MAME have not yet been able to accurately emulate some sound chips. In the case of Q*bert, the mock curse words were randomly generated using a speech synthesizer chip that has not been emulated.
Fortunately, there is a solution. Owners of the original arcade games have meticulously recorded the individual missing sound effects, in WAV file format, and the writers of the emulation code have included support for these files. In a remarkable display of foresight, some games that have been dumped and emulated have been coded to accept samples even if recordings of the arcade sounds are not yet available, in the hopes that one day an owner of the original machine will record the sounds.
3.9.2. Finding Samples
Though ROMs dumped from arcade games, being of dubious legality, are not provided on any official MAME site, samples are. A page at the official MAME site, http://www.mame.net/downsamples.html is updated regularly with the latest officially supported sample setall the samples you need for your game collection to be complete. Samples currently exist and are required for approximately sixty games including Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, and Zaxxon.
If sound hardware is properly emulated in the future, the samples will be removed from the official list (recent examples of this include Punch-Out!!, Phoenix, and Track and Field). Samples are also occasionally updated to better reflect the true sound of the arcade machine. If you would like to hear some of these obsolete samples (or if you are running an older version of MAME and need them), an archive of outdated versions is available at Twisty's MAME Samples Collection (http://www.mameworld.net/samples/).
3.9.3. Installing Samples
Like installing ROMs, it couldn't be easier. Samples are provided in Zip archive file format, which you do not need to extract. Simply save the .zip file, as is, in the samples directory under your MAME directory. Do not change the filename, or MAME will be unable to find the samples.
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Twisty's archive, mentioned earlier, even contains some alternate fan-created sample sets that make your games sound rather different than you remember. Want to add synthesized speech into Galaga? Done. Just remember to back up your old sample file first so you can change the sounds back to normal later.
You might have noticed that samples add quite a bit of heft to the file size of the gamewhereas the Q*bert ROM only takes up 64K, the samples are over two megabytes. There is a silver lining here: the same set of samples will suffice for all variations of a game. So if you're a Space Invaders fanatic and have not only the original game, but also the knockoffs like Space Laser, Space King II, and Space Intruders, the same Zip file of samples will be loaded up for each game. You don't have to rename or duplicate the archive.
Before I leave off, I'd like to mention that the attentive reader will have worked out one more disadvantage of samples. The Q*bert curses you so fondly remember were randomly generated by the speech synthesizer, regardless of the stories from kids at the pizza parlor who swore they heard the little guy say a real dirty word. Though the sample pack does contain an assortment of different randomly generated phrases, it is thus not entirely arcade-perfect. (Though one of the samples really does sound like he's saying "oh st." I swear!)
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