PSX Doom with PC sound effects (on a real console)

READ THIS IF YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW I DID THIS. This is mostly a proof of concept more than anything else, showing that this can indeed be done and that it does work on the real thing, but it’s a painful and long process. To get the PC sounds on the entire game, you need to edit 61 files (holy shit), at the time I’m uploading this I’ve done 19. If you want to do Final Doom as well, add 32 more files to your list. No download available at the moment, I will make these available when I realize I don’t want to keep doing this or when I get a substantial amount of work done. Long technical information following! While it is not that hard once you get the hang of it, it’s one of the most time consuming things you can do to a Doom game. If you’re familiar with vanilla Doom, you know sound effects are stored inside the WAD file. This is not the case for PSX Doom; the sounds are stored in LCD files (no, not screens, .LCD files). There is no known tool to manipulate these files directly so you need a hex editor to do all the work (which means figuring out the addresses for each sample in an LCD file and big chances of fucking up), but that’s not the worst part. The game actually has caches for every map, so every map has an LCD file, apart from a general one and one for the ending cast, each with the sounds of every monster (mostly) used in that map. That means a total of 61 LCD files to edit, each with around 20-35 sounds each. Make the math and get demotivated, this is not gonna be a short thing. Now, let’s talk about the format of the audio samples. They’re stored in the PSX VAG format, but headerless. Thankfully, there’s MFAudio that can convert a WAV file to VAG without much trouble, just make sure your sounds are 16 bits (this is the reason I suspect they replaced the sound effects, as the originals are in 8 bits). Because the game looks for samples on specific addresses on each LCD file, your new samples must be smaller or the same size as the ones already there and unfortunately, many sounds from the PC version ended up being longer than the PSX ones and they had to be shortened somehow. I just trimmed some of them and sped up some others. So, now that you have all your samples ready to be inserted, you gotta find the address in which each sample begins and end, so you know where to insert your new data and how long it can be. Also, your resulting LCD files cannot be larger than the originals, since you can’t touch the table of contents of the CD data, otherwise the game will not run. To do this final step of importing your modded LCD files to the CD image, you use CDMage, which edits the data of the files you are importing but keeps the internal structure of the CD and the rest of the files intact. This means for the console the game is not different at all and you can play this modded version even on a stock PSX (which I did here, just put something on the lid sensor so you can make the console work with the lid open, let the game start and swap the original CD for a burned CD with the modded version during the “Licensed by...“ screen, pretty similar to the good old swap method, but even easier and simpler). Now, there’s even more technical information that I will not address here, but if you want to dare to embark in this endeavor, I’ll be glad to assist you. One last thing you might want to know. Why? Why do this? Well, this is just a personal opinion but I feel the sound effects in the PSX version are a little bit out of place with the rest of the aesthetics. They work very well in Doom 64 along with the rest of the makeover, but in PSX Doom you see classic Doom but you hear something else. This brings back a little bit more of the classic vibe to the game. Further modifications could be replacing the redbook audio for recordings of music from Doom and Doom II played through an SC-55 or something like that, which is a lot easier to do than replacing the samples. Also, replacing some of the graphics could be interesting to experiment with and might look nice, but I haven’t figured out the format of the graphics and how to edit the WAD file correctly. If you read until here, wow. You are really interested in this, I see. Hopefully someone will get a kick out of this. If this gathers enough interest, I might release it formally.