Laser Ball
Williams, 1979After some reading, I've found that early Gottlieb sound boards interfaced with the MPU via a simple 4/5 wire binary connector, where you just pipe in the number of the sound you want played, but I haven't been able to find any such information for Williams (specifically Laser Ball, I'm unsure of what you would call the specific boards beyond 'no speech'). Does anyone know if someone has documented this anywhere?
Look at the pin designations for the connectors on the driver board and sound board in the manual. A few of the solenoid outputs on the driver board feed into the inputs on the sound board.
Check for the correct voltage. Check for connectivity between all the connectors. Verify that the EPROM hasn't been erased or corrupted.
Beyond that, there is additional board-level troubleshooting that would need to be performed.
Williams sounds, at least until the end of system 6, were treated essentially the same as firing a solenoid. Same driver board outputs as the chime box had on the first couple solid state games.
Sounds are triggered by grounding the input pins on the sound board.
System 7 sound boards work the same, other than having a dedicated cpu board Pia chip to free up solenoid circuits.
Quoted from HHaase:Williams sounds, at least until the end of system 6, were treated essentially the same as firing a solenoid. Same driver board outputs as the chime box had on the first couple solid state games.
Sounds are triggered by grounding the input pins on the sound board.
Looking at the schematic I count 8 pins coming in, so if my understanding is correct it's limited to just 8 sounds?
Quoted from vid1900:It's combinations of the pins to trigger over 30 sounds.
There appears to be pulsing patterns to that make the inputs even more complex for background sound games. Also one of the inputs is for silencing all noise too.
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