I really love that beautiful new throne room... I especially liked seeing the cloth texture put onto the throne.
However it would bring things down a bit to use just the old font run through a filter. I mean it looks fine in the thumbnail but not so much full size. So I set about looking for a good replacement font and so far this one seems the best as a replacement for HD sizes:
http://www.dafont.com/katana.font
or
http://www.dafont.com/japestyle.font
or
http://www.dafont.com/orchidee.font
Unless you perhaps vectorize it so it doesn't become so jagged\pixelated. If you must keep the original font you can try running it through a vectorizing process sort of like this:
Original (for reference):
Quick vectorization:
I experimented around a bit with replacing the drop shadow on the name:
or this with a bit more opacity:
Using a new font or vectoring the old one at a bigger size than the screen and scaling it down would be the best. But yeah other than that that's how the energy bars should be. The example above was done via the web site "vectormagic" at high detail.... Also I think the shadows underneath the letters could be reworked to be more like the inner shadow of the life bar on the example pic.
You may or may not see much of a difference on the above pics but if you vectorized the fonts at a larger size than the target resolution even if you end up rasterizing them into a png like I did it can be more easily scaled to the output size in HD quality.
As for the sounds I wouldn't go with any of the 16-bit consoles sounds either as they tend to have music that is the MIDI specific to those systems. I've always found the arcade music to be better sounding even in MK1. But do you even have a sound guy on this project? I also wonder if it's a bit too early to worry about the sound.
The best thing would be to have a musician make new true to the original tracks just doing for the music what you are doing for the visuals. But barring that the old songs could be filtered to add stereo sound.
The sound effects could be touched up a bit maybe but should be used as they have a certain charm to them and are a part of the feel of the game. Those would be difficult to impossible to replace unless you had the original masters had they recorded them on a DAT or in a higher sample form saved somewhere (yeah right) or If you knew exactly how they made for example all the punching\hitting sound effects and had people who sound exactly like the ones who originally made the voices (Boon and Co.)
John Tobias said recently in twitter that he did the announcer voice in MK1, btw.
I don't think we should just rip the sound effects from newer MK games like MK9.... especially if you intend on using sound effects from part 1 as well... it would be jarring to have effects of differing vintages and the later MKs don't have the sounds they make when throwing standing punches for example or the same kind of uppercut sound effect.
MUGEN has stereo sound right? So if the action happens totally on the right side of the screen it can play from the right speaker (or left depending on which side the characters are on at a given moment)? I was just thinking that's just the main feature the soundtrack could use in an HD remake.