Make video game sounds

From a recent post on Metafilter, I found the application sfxr, a little utility that makes video game sounds. It actually has buttons labeled "powerup" and "explosion." When you click one of these, you get a randomly generated sound, but one generated according to parameters that make it fit its label. I don't know how that works, but all the explosions do sound like explosions...explosions from an early arcade game. After you generate a sound, you can tweak a bunch of sliders to change it, or save it to a file. Great tool for adding sounds to homebrewed games. 

sfxr's author, DrPetter, has a number of other interesting programs on his web site, including a multiplayer boat fight game, netboats, that I want to try out. For some of these he includes source code, so it's an interesting site to explore.

The tool is available for Windows/Mac/Linux. All of DrPetter's programs seem to be offered as zip downloads: give 'em a folder to live in and run the .exe and you're done, no install needed. I love that.