Pacman Waka sound

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I am trying to recreate the "waka" sound of Pacman:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbR_-kVEYQ0

I followed some of the advices from this thread but without really convincing results:
http://www.korgforums.com/forum/phpBB2/ ... 9d0ce4ce33

Does someone knows how to make this sound?
I would like to build it in Avenger but I appreciate any hints with other VSTis.

[3ee]

sample, slow-down to inspect the pitch intervals.. (or simply get a quantised/stepped LFO with triangle wave if exact pitches aren't that important)

Avenger should have some kind of multi-point envelope or modulation levels...

modulate pitch with the amount of 12 or 24 for one octave or two if one isn't enough... set the envelope segments to the correct pitches, loop the envelope and give it the right speed and that's about it...

use an oscilloscope to check out the wave .. it sounds like a narrow-ish pulse wave... maybe also play with bit and/or sample-rate reduction for some extra crunch

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Thank you for your suggestions.

Analysing a sample of the sound is a good advice and I will try, but I must confess that I am not so good to "see" from a complex sound.

With one Modulation enveloppe for the osc pitch and another one for the osc volume I can now mimic the overall movement of the sound.
Using the same time value for both modulation envelopes I am also able to mimic the attack for both high and low pitch of the sound.
So this part of the sound is almost solved.

But where I fail is to find the right combination of osc shape and effect to achieve the quite clean scratch timbre of the sound.
A bit crusher helps indeed but it is quite a blind trial and error because in one case a square wave may works a little and in another case a sine wave works better and another time a pulse wave is better and so on.
So it seems everything is possible and I can't find out at the moment if I should concentrate only on one type of osc shape!
Also everything I tried has always a too pronounced musical pitch.

Any further hints are welcome.

BTW I realize that I already learn quite a lot with this exercise

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I just found this in post #29 of this thread on Gearslutz:
https://www.gearslutz.com/board/electro ... ounds.html

Pacman (and the other Namco games of that era) used "samples" (waveforms stored in ROM) played through a DAC. As mentioned, Namco used a custom 3-voice sound chip that played waveforms stored in a PROM chip. The music and tone-type sounds are single-wave looped samples while the fancier sounds (like the Pacman "wucka wucka" chomp sound) was probably a custom sample in the PROM. It would be interesting to learn how they actually came up with the sounds, if they used a synth and recorded it, or just played around on a computer, playing different combinations of sample words until they got something they liked.

Then later in the thread (post #38) someone else answered:

Nope, the fancier sounds use the same basic waves, the wacka wacka would be a basic waveform modulated with code. The code would say "Play this waveform, which sounds like a tone with a little shift register noise, low to high really quick in a stepped fashion (in a midi piano scroll it would look like a rapidly rising stair case shape) then play the waveform in a descending fashion, then repeat." That'd get you a couple of wackas ... They were basically doing complex pitch LFO/Envelope stuff IN THE CODE.

Well, thoughts to work on!
Unfortunately there is no details on the "basic wave" and I do not know exactly what "a tone with a little shift register noise" means.
As previously mentioned, I got the up and down of the sound including the similar attack but the timbre is difficult for me to find.
Maybe I should try a third modulation envelope for the scratching timbre alone!

Anyway analysing the sound I found out that the sound seems to have two frequencies: d + a then c# + g#
The first part of the sound is slightly ascending with some slow attak to d + a
the second part is slightly descending with a little faster attack to c# and g#

BTW I just saw that all the Pacman sounds are recreated in the Korg App Gadget-Kamata!
But my aim is to build such sounds with an "usual" VSTi (meaning not specialized for chip sounds)

Again any help from achieved (or others) sound designers are welcome

[mcbpete]

By 'basic wave' I'd imagine it'll be either a square or sawtooth as they're the simplest to calculate CPU wise. The 'shift register' could be referring to modifying the frequency by adjusting the bits (eg a left shift of 00000001 (decimal 1) would then become 00000010 (dec 2), then 00000100 (dec 4), 00001000 (dec 8 ) etc. ) so each 'step' the frequency would double or half (depending on the shift register moving to the left or right)

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@mcbpete
Thank you for these interesting informations.
The thing is I have absolutely no idea how what you describe can be achieved within a VSTi like Avenger.

In the meantime I have read several things about Analog Shift Register (ASR) something which seem to have been widely used in digital synth in the 80s and that is to find within modular synth but I am not sure if this is what has been suggested.
This also does not seem to be found in todays VSTis

[V0RT3X]

I'd pick up Chipsounds or Korg Gadget as a starting point.


Another thing you could do is just "sample" the sound through an emulator or something. I know it sounds like blasmephy, but honestly why would you want to spend so much of your production time recreating this sound. It would let you focus more on the musical side of things in your track IMO

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I'd pick up Chipsounds or Korg Gadget as a starting point.


Another thing you could do is just "sample" the sound through an emulator or something. I know it sounds like blasmephy, but honestly why would you want to spend so much of your production time recreating this sound. It would let you focus more on the musical side of things in your track IMO

Thanks for your thoughts.
Yes of course these would be two good solutions, and for me absolutely no blasphemy
I am also not trying to get an 100% authentic reproduction of the sound.

But the main reason why I try to do this is out of curiosity and fun.
I like to find out how these 8-bit chip sounds have been made.
It is also for me an exercise and a way to discover some aspect of Avenger (or any similar VSTi) going a little further than just tweaking an existing preset.
BTW the 8-Bit Era expansion for Avenger woke up my curiosity but this is too expensive for my budget though I really would love to learn from this expansion!

I will probably use this kind of sound at some point and when the time comes I may use a specialized VSTi but right now I like to use and learn what I already have instead of buying one more VSTi or more presets.
I already could recreate a few sounds but this particular one is not so easy for me.

[mcbpete]

Here's a nice breakdown that I guess could be applied to most VSTs (you could use the free version of the below example VST from here: https://tal-software.com/products/tal-u-no-62 )

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hr6D2dRSoN8

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@mcbpete
Yes this tutorial is great and I already had found it
And indeed it works great for any synth!
If only the waka sound would be as easy!

As previously mentioned someone was able to reproduce all the Pacman sounds with Korg Gadget and Kamata
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xaprQTvMyI

I believe the Kamata screen which appears in the video at about 0:52 shows the Kamata settings for the Waka sound.
I have found the manual for Korg Gadget where the parameter for Kamata are described at page 56
https://www.korguser.net/gadget/manual/ ... _GG_E1.pdf
I will try if these setting are usefull in Avenger.

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BTW if someone is interested, here are three tutorials for 8 bit chip sounds that can be easily applied to any synth:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmXEFzBSSa4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPN8zqphmf8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btFH6JIJ0oQ

[Jace-BeOS]

Fun thread. Sort of related:

Some old arcade game sounds that seemed to be multiple sounds at once were created on monophonic tone generators by very quickly shifting from one waveform to another. The sounds in the PC DOS games "Round 42" and "Robotron 2084" (sounding different from the arcade original) are great examples. When sampled and viewed in a wave editor, you can see the switching between waveforms. Also, the rate at which the switching is done imparts further tonal changes.

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According to this document:
https://www.lomont.org/Software/Games/P ... lation.pdf

these are the waves of the Pac Man original hardware:



The author writes that probably only the first 8 waves have been used.

The third wave at the top ist the one used for the waka sound as to see in the Korg Kamata video I mentioned above:



Can someone tell me what is this wave?
I mean is this combination of three waves a known or typical combination or is it an arbitrary small wave table?

BTW this wave corresponds quite well to what I can see when I open the Waka sample in my audio editor, the wave is only a bit crushed/distorded:

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I Tried to reproduce this wave and now I get a much better timbre for the sound.

With the help of the coordinates as seen in the image below I could draw manually the wave in Audacity.
Here is the result in AUdacity:


As I draw manually the result is of course quite aproximative and dirty.

Considering that one can clearly see the coordinates, is there a programm which can help to draw exactly with these values?

In the image posted in the previous post there is a time line grid with values from 0 to 31.
The highest point of the first sinus cycle is at 4
zero crossing at 8
lowest point at 12
next zerocrossing at 16
the highest point of the next sinus cycle is at 19
next zerocrossing at 22
lowest point at 25
next zerocrossing at 28
The highest point of the last sinus cycle is at 29
next zerocrossing at 30
lowest and last point at 31

Again With the help of two Mod Env for pitch and volume I can now aproximatively achieve a similar sound.
I must still get rid of the basic frequency which is too prominent.
And the attack is still not right, but it's a beginning

Here you can hear what I could achieve:
https://instaud.io/2iHh

[Frantz]

Sounds great!