The NES version is notorious for its poor-quality voice samples, which among other things resulted in numerous mondegreens of the game's title. This is due to an oversight born out of an idiosyncrasy with the console's hardware: the NES's Ricoh 2A03 chip reads DPCM samples' bytes from right to left, whereas the samples themselves are programmed to be read from the traditional left to right. This oversight was not discovered until 2020, when a user on the NesDev forums accidentally reversed the bit order of the game's DPCM samples, resulting in significantly improved playback quality.

This issue is not limited to Double Dribble, with similar bit order errors occurring in Abadox: The Deadly Inner War, Ufouria: The Saga, Bomberman II, Mr. Gimmick, Klax, Sword Master, and A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia, among others.