Skate or Die 2 voice samples?

I know this has been asked a few times before, but I haven't seen a working, proper link to someone's dumped files.

Hello, I'm new here, hello NesDev!

I was looking for some samples of the voices in Skate or Die 2 during the intro for an interactive website I'm creating that'll work like the game into, except you can remix it yourself. The reason why - well, the intro's pretty darn sweet, right? Anyways, I just want (preferably a MP3 or WAV file) of those voice samples so that I can use.

Thanks, guys!

(Skate! Or! Die! Skate or Die! Die-die-die-die-die!)

ComputerCraze

Is there a reason you can't make this yourself?

You can get the Skate or Die 2 NSF, then use NSFplay (a.k.a. NSFplug, which is the Winamp plugin version) to play it back. Click the Properties button, go to View -> Channel Mask, then under APU/FDS, disable all the channels shown except for DMC.

The .wav recording is easiest with Winamp simply because it can output to .WAV natively through the Disk Writer output plugin, but if you have a sound card/sound driver that offers "Stereo Mix" or "What-U-Hear" you could capture the played audio that way. Audacity works well for such recording. Otherwise if your sound card/driver doesn't support the aforementioned, you might be able to use OBS/OBS Studio to save locally, then extract the audio from the resulting mp4/mkv/flv.

I'd also suggest getting permission from the publisher (Electronic Arts) before using this on some kind of public website. Rob Hubbard is the original composer/author, but EA likely owns the rights to it.

Oh wow, didn't know you could mix the channels in NSFLive, whoops...

Well, thanks!

ComputerCraze

For games that use uncompressed PCM samples, often you can just import the ROM into an audio editor to find and extract the original sample data.

In Audacity it's File > Import > Raw Data. Choose unsigned 8 bit PCM, Mono, and a suitable samplerate (~3000 seems to be about right for this one). You can just play the data back, and you'll hear the samples somewhere in the middle of the ugly noise of the rest of the data.

Edit: tepples explains below, it's actually 4 bit PCM at ~6000 Hz, which is not a format Audacity will import directly.


Though, this technique is only if you want to extract the original data. Probably you just want the sample as-played, so, yeah, muting the other channels and recording a WAV from whatever emulator you're using is pretty easy for that.



You can in FCEUX or Nestopia too, and probably several other emulators.

SoD2's samples are 4-bit linear PCM (or as linear as the APU DMC DAC allows). Years ago, I wrote an extractor that turns the whole ROM into a wave file; it shouldn't be too hard to write your own if you know any PC programming language.

Ah, interesting! So it wasn't quite using the naïve format. Interpreting them as 8-bit PCM still produces intelligible samples (since the high nibble comes through intact), but I can see (hear) now that it's at half the real samplerate.

An initial scan of the ROM shows 8K of sample data is at 143A1 through 160A0 which has the guitar sample and "...or die".

Wasn't that hard to find looking for $4011 writes and then the indirect address filling a zeropage space.