What VSTs do you recommend for old school game sounds? Also, where to find game effects?

[Incinerator Drone]

I'm looking to take classic gaming sounds and styles and make them a bit more modernized... in my own pieces. Something along the lines of what bit.trip beat on WiiWare is doing, if any of you have played that.

Right now I have a "Basic" computer VST and 3 NES ones (Peach, Toad, Link) all of which I like a lot, but I want to find some that sound erm... more advanced but still video game-ish, if that makes sense? Especially a bass, the bass I use for my songs right now sounds more like a rock bass than a good electronic bass. I feel like right now I have some nice old school gaming VSTs and then some typical synths and stuff but nothing in between.

Also, anyone know a good place to get a lot of game effects quickly and easily? I have a few Mario effects but I want more... Mega Man, Castlevania, whatever. Give myself more to play with.

[Yoozer]

http://www.ymck.net/download/index.html

http://refx.com/?page=products/quadrasid/summary

get a lot of game effects quickly and easily?

Just record them from an emulator. Yes, it's not quickly, but a little effort won't kill you.

[Zephyr]

Just seeing the threadtitle I was going to recommend Toad, Peach, and Triforce, but I see that you have that already. Have you tried Syntendo (or however that's spelt) I think it has a bit more functionality. Good luck.

[Incinerator Drone]

Nah never tried Syntendo, I'll check that out. Turns out I already have Magic 8-Bit but I'll check out that other one.

As for the effects, I'm sure you CAN record them from emulator but I'm also sure they have to be out there somewhere already so it'd save a lot of trouble. I remember like a year ago I found a place where I got a ton of the Super Mario 1/2/3 effects, I mean a TON but I can't recall where it was.

[KaelitioN]

There is a VST from mda called degrade , which brings anything down to 8-bit and you can also bring down the sample rate. Very lo-fi glitchy effects. Then just add regular sine , saw , square , and triangle waves from any virtual analog VSTi (even FL Studio's 3XOsc) , add the Degrade plug-in , and you have decent models of the NES sound chip.

http://mda.smartelectronix.com/

These guys also have some instruments for lo-fi old keyboard modeled sounds:

http://www.pethu.se/music/instruments.html

[Groovemaster303]

VOPM is pretty damn at emulating the classic Megadrive/Genesis sound, if you like that kind of thing.

http://www.kvraudio.com/get/228.html

It's one of my favourite plugins.

[Anapan]

I made a page with some VSTs, Soundfonts, and stand-alone midi rendering programs, followed by links to some other great resources.

http://www3.telus.net/anapan8/oldscardemu.htm

For the best list of videogame/chiptune sounding VST's I've ever found check out the chiptuning section of Woolyss.

http://www.woolyss.free.fr/

For the sound effects, it depends on the system. For older game systems (NES or C64) the sounds are actually short sequences of notes run through the soundchip (like small songs) - Those can be recorded from an emulator - not too hard especially if there's a sound test or you are able to turn off all the sound channels but the ones the sound is played through. Some of the NSF (nintendo music rips) even have have sound effects included after the songs - I have a Megaman NSF that has a full sound effect rip so from Winamp, you could switch to disk recording and play through all the tracks in the file to get all the sound effects. I might have a full set of Castlevania 3 sound effects laying around somewhere too. If the sound effects are actually waveforms and not notes there's usually a way to rip the raw waveforms from the rom/iso, or in some cases a savestate. I figured out how to do it on SNES, (most)GBA, Playstation 1, PCE-CD and a few others.

If you list the systems or specific games you're interested in I can provide instructions for getting all the sounds from most of them.