Minecraft: Sound Blaster Pro Edition

A resourcepack that transforms Minecraft's vanilla audio (excluding music) into an authentic MS-DOS Sound Blaster experience.

🔉 Why This Exists

Modern Minecraft audio is too clean! We’ve already made resourcepacks for Euphonium and Golden Days, downsampling and adding analog imperfections to their sounds. Now, we bring that same retro crunch to vanilla—reimagining both SFX and ambient audio through the gritty, warm lens of early ‘90s PC hardware. Want to feel like you’re exploring your worlds on a DOS machine? This is for you.

🎛️ Technical Deep Dive

This pack applies distinct effect chains to two categories: SFX and ambient. The core idea—Sound Blaster Pro–style 8-bit audio at 22.05 kHz—remains consistent, but with slight differences in noise levels, filtering, and distortion to best capture each type of sound.

22.05 kHz Sample Rate

• Matches the Sound Blaster Pro’s hardware limit for games (half the 44.1 kHz CD standard).
• Reduces high-frequency aliasing, reflecting the analog low-pass filtering of original SB Pro hardware.

8-Bit Depth + TPDF Dithering

• The SB Pro used 8-bit DACs (e.g., VOC files).
• Dithering: TPDF (Triangular Probability Density Function) with Shibata noise shaping recreates the card’s analog noise floor, avoiding digital harshness while preserving audio nuances.

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Ambient Chain

For rain, thunder, nether ambience, cave noises, lava/water loops, portals, fire loops, elytra flight loop, respawn anchor hum, pointed dripstone drips, conduit ambiance, and bubble columns:

• Brown Noise @ -50 dB: Subtle hiss to emulate background interference.
• Low-Pass Filter @ 7500 Hz: Gently rolls off highs for that classic SB Pro atmosphere.
• Overdrive 2 + Gain -1: Mild distortion reminiscent of the SB Pro’s output stage, with a small gain reduction to prevent clipping after noise and dithering.

SFX Chain

All other vanilla sounds (mobs, player actions, block interactions, UI sounds, etc.) get a slightly more pronounced “crunch”:

• Brown Noise @ -45 dB: A bit louder to underscore the immediate, punchy nature of short sound effects.
• Low-Pass Filter @ 7000 Hz: A slightly stronger roll-off for that trademark DOS-era “bite.”
• Overdrive 4 + Gain -1: More aggressive distortion to capture the SB Pro’s op-amp grit in action-heavy sounds.

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📼 Authenticity Notes

• Tested against real SB Pro recordings from Duke Nukem 3D and DOSBox-Staging’s emulation.
• The production chain (sox effects + noise shaping) closely mirrors how many DOS games (e.g., Doom) mixed PCM audio.

⛔ Music Excluded

Minecraft’s music is not included in this pack. It will be handled in a separate project, which will recreate the tracks using an OPL2-based soundfont, faithfully replicating the early ‘90s FM synthesis style (e.g., AdLib, Sound Blaster Pro).

⚠️ Limitation: Always-Binaural Audio in Minecraft

Minecraft always uses binaural mixing to position sounds in 3D space. Although there is a toggle for HRTF (head-related transfer function), it doesn’t actually disable the underlying binaural engine—only the specific HRTF algorithm. This means that any noise embedded in an SFX is perceived as coming from that sound’s in-world location, rather than being a constant, global “floor” like on real Sound Blaster hardware.

Right now, there’s no known way to remove binaural processing entirely without forcing your entire system into mono output, which would be historically inaccurate (since Sound Blaster cards did support stereo).

⚙️ Compatibility

• Designed for Minecraft 1.20.1 (other versions untested!).

🖇️ Credits

• Tools: sox for DSP, find/bash for batch processing.
• Inspiration: The VOGONS community, SBEMU project, and real SB16 hardware tests.

"It’s not a bug – it’s a feature (of 1992)."