Emulating the Nintendo Pulse Channel in Reaktor (Part iii)

In this video, I show how to emulate the Nintendo Pulse Channel in Reaktor. This simple setup can be used to recreate many iconic sound effects, such as the jump and fireball sounds from Super Mario Brothers as well as many of the effects from Galaga and countless other games.

A simple Pulse Sync module from the Oscillator menu in Primary is the the sole sound source in today’s project. The trick to getting the sound of the Nintendo Pulse Channel is in controlling the width  and pitch inputs properly.

The width is easy enough to implement (it can be done in it’s entirety with a single List module). The pitch, on the other hand, takes a little bit to get correctly. First, it’s important to use the same method as the NES for calculating frequencies, which introduces a little bit (not much, really) tuning error.

The most exciting characteristic of the Nintendo Pulse Channel, however, is the sweep unit, which modulates the pitch of the oscillator up or down. Combined with the imprecise tuning of the channel, this creates many iconic 8-bit effects.