I got confused. I immediately think of NES whenever I read the word Contra.
But well, try looking around for VGM files for those arcade games and play them on an appropriate player with channel splitting (in_vgm for Winamp should be good enough). If you already did that, uh, there's not much I can do to help.
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Was really bored and came up with a Slap bass wave for FDS. I just can't have enough slap bass.
Bonus points if you figure out where this bassline comes from.
A small instrument set I'd like to share from a project of mine. I'll be making a sound driver for the NES, and it'll be capable of about as much as the SMB1 engine, and a bit more (vibrato and tonal drums with hardware sweep, more sophisticated noise instruments)
There are 8 instruments for the pulse channels, all of which have 8 volume entries, and the note is sustained on the fourth one. The ftm is overclocked to 240Hz in order to simulate the hardware volume envelopes for the noise channel. For the noise channel, there are only three drum types, and all of them use 4 frequencies.