Hello again bomberfans! I got quite busy with school. This is my final year before I graduate uni and so I've been away from this site for a long while... sorry!
To make up for my disappearance, I am introducing the Bomberman 64 music sample search project, "Where'd You Come from?"
My memory is a little foggy but I think the story goes something like this:
I was using an online midi editor called "signal" and I noticed that in their default loaded soundfont, one of the samples was identical (other than sound quality/compression) to one of the samples in the Bomberman 64 soundfont. This ended up sending me on a bit of a quest to find where exactly it originated from. I was able to find the soundfont (A320U soundfont) but unfortunately, it dates back to the early 2000's rather than the 90s or prior, so this can't be the origin. I still have not found the sample origin, even after trying to contact the author of the soundfont!
So anyways, I have since been on a quest to find a matching sample. And while I was listening to sounds from a plethora of different old keyboards (rolands, yamahas, and others of those sexy keyboards), I accidentally came across what I believe is the original lead instrument of "Green Gardens"!
This sparked my interest in finding other B64 samples. Funny enough, I was able to find some! As such, I will be using this thread to share my sample origins and current searches. Anyone is free to join this search (in fact, it would be greatly appreciated!).
I would recommend referencing this to understand the instrument names used in the soundfont: https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts/8288
Hope you guys will enjoy!
_________________ My friends, my fellow conscripts,
We
Have Scored!
I feel so much better.
Instr_5C is used as the lead in the Green Garden theme. This sample seems to come from the OMI Sonic Images CD-ROM (1992).
Part of the sample is definitely cut off, but there's no doubt in my mind that this is the one!
Apparently, it was quite common for N64 game composers to use samples from CD sound libraries like this. Awesome!
I'm not sure where this instrument is used, but it is absolutely beautiful imo. It seems to come from the Sound & Vision, Gigapack CD, a Roland Sxx CD-ROM. Specifically, it's samples SYN:ResoTable 1-3. In the B64 soundfont, several octaves are put into a single instrument. I couldn't believe it when I heard it in video! Of all the samples, I did not really expect this one to pop up like it did.
For more certainty, I decided to compare the soundwaves of the samples, shown below.
Note the stunning similarity between the first wave and the red sectioned area of the second wave! I think we have a match!
So, I can't really confirm this one. This is a choir chord sample and iirc it's used in Altair's theme. The problem is, the compression for Instr_35 is so bad in the soundfont, that it's hard to tell if this Gigapack sample (called SYN:Dance 202) is actually the correct original. However, I do find it promising that Instr_35 has C tuned to this exact note/chord! I think it could be a match.
In a conversation with a friend of mine I mentioned that there exists a similar sample in the Large The Killer CD, however I noted to them that this is an AKAI S1000 CD-ROM and that it is apparently not tuned to the same note/chord defaultly.
In conclusion, I dunno! Buuut... my money is on Gigapack 2!
Alrighty well that concludes the first set of samples I've found. If I can find more, I'll expand out my thread!
_________________ My friends, my fellow conscripts,
We
Have Scored!
I feel so much better.
Apparently, it was quite common for N64 game composers to use samples from CD sound libraries like this. Awesome!
That tracks, since I recall (or I think I do) several N64 games using the same or very similar samples to other games, though if memory serves it was mostly Rareware games.
That tracks, since I recall (or I think I do) several N64 games using the same or very similar samples to other games, though if memory serves it was mostly Rareware games.
I'm back I'm back! I have some cool finds to share. Not sure if we have matches here, but I want to show them! I have been going through some 90s CD audio libraries and I am happy to say I think I found the very first sample I went searching for! (well... almost... I'll explain below)
Instr_32 : XCH 08 +7 (AKAI Professional - Vol 1 XL S3000/CD3000 samples) *not exact match, very likely a variation of this sample*
Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ6ZSKoWfoU (33:32)
There's a bunch of music terms here so lmk if confused. So when I heard this one, it was almost like a sleeper agent code. I knew that little trickling effect was familiar. The one thing that was unusual though was that this sample is a 5th starting from C3 and in B64, it's simply C3 (no interval). In much easier terms, this implies that in the first sample, two notes are playing at the same time and for the second, it's only one. Naturally this means that the soundwave graphs will not match, so I can't quite go off of that.
HOWEVER! I got thinking to myself, "what are the numbers beside the sample names"? Abbreviations like MJ7 (major 7th) and MN7 (minor 7th) were more obvious, but what the heck are the numbers? After looking at a few different samples, I came to the conclusion that the number refers to how far away the second note is from the first (in semitones). This makes a lot of sense- starting from C, if we travel +7 semitones, we end up at G! If it were minus like in XCH 03 -5, we would go down 5 semitones from the start note.
So, given that XCH 08 +7 exists, I am absolutely convinced there is a version of this sample without this extra added note. I unfortunately cannot find this on any youtube video and (believe it or not) I don't have an AKAI s3000 or cd3000 just sitting around at home .
IF ANYONE HAS WORKED WITH EITHER OF THESE SAMPLERS OR HAs HEARD THE ORIGINAL SAMPLE, PLEASE SHARE!
Tee hee I love this silly sample. I have it named as "wah trombone".
So this one does not originally come from an AKAI sampler of course, it's a Moog sample! It seems to me it's also very common for sample libraries to take samples from all sorts of different sources, samplers, etc. I can't confirm this one for sure, and I can't compare the waves right now because viena64 is displaying the waves for different notes than those in the video (the comparison would be pointless lol). But the dramatic swell and overwhelming sound makes me think there's a good chance it's a match! It also comes from the sample library/sampler which makes me more confident.
That's all for today!
Last edited by Alnair on Fri May 01, 2026 7:40 pm
_________________ My friends, my fellow conscripts,
We
Have Scored!
I feel so much better.
That is some impressive investigation work! It took me a couple minutes to make sense why the notes would be labeled that way, but the more I thought about it the more I realized it's not a bad way to make sure they can be read intuitively (provided one knows the meaning of the numbers).
Thanks! Yeah, a lot of these samples in these packs tend to have unusual sorts of names. I figured there was something here because of how close it sounded to the B64 sample, so having the revelation about the semitones was wonderful. I don't however know what XCH means... we may never know!
_________________ My friends, my fellow conscripts,
We
Have Scored!
I feel so much better.
I don't however know what XCH means... we may never know!
At first I assumed X had something to do with xylophone and the C and H were labels for how a xylo sample might have been modified. However, a search online turned up something different entirely.
After a bit more searching, XCH might mean XT Classical Half-set, with XT being wire-coated strings. Though I have no way of knowing how accurate this is with my borderline non-existent musical knowledge.
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