Hey everyone. I have been working on doing a retheme of my Gottlieb Hollywood Heat into a Grand Theft Auto: Vice City themed machine. Artwork is currently going through the second stage of revisions with a professional graphic artist. While my end goal is to create a "kit" that can be made to soft-mod other Hollywood Heat machines (basically allowing the conversion without having to re-do the playfield of cabinet artwork), I would really like to make my personal one as epic as the Flash Gordon -> Ghostbusters conversion done a few years back.

I think I have most of the artwork in-process or planned at this point, but the next step is integrating sound into the build. I know I've created a thread previously on this, and I am looking at experimenting with Aurduino or Rasp Pi as other members here had some success in using that along with . I know the Ghostbusters retheme used a 2nd set of switches tied to an MP3 trigger system, and that is a possibility as well.

I'm looking to anyone in the community that might be willing to help me work through some of the details, hang-ups, and technical problems I am trying to solution ahead of time in hopes of using that information to properly develop the best solution for my goal. Any ideas, constructive criticism, or direction in achieving these goals would be greatly appreciated.

I do have a degree in Electrical Engineering but work in IT, so a good chunk of my skills are quite rusty and I cannot program for the life of me (but I'll learn Aurduino for this if needed).

OK, enough background. Here's a few of the ideas I've had, along with implementation questions.

1) I'd like to use some sounds from the game. Taking a look at the game download, it appears as if there is a massive amount of sound files. Finding individual sounds might be pretty annoying. I may wind up using pre-sampled recordings people have posted on the net. Pros/Cons to sampling vs. using pre-recorded samples?

2) This one is pretty rough, and I just can't seem to wrap my head around this one. So the machine has 2 buttons in the front (I honestly don't even know what the game uses them for), and I would like to use these to choose the radio station that will play during the game. The big problem comes in while changing stations. How would I make it so you can choose between, say, 5 tracks that will not stop while changing between them? Is this even possible? I'd like to retain this as it really gives the feel of switching stations rather than just simply swapping tracks that will restart each time the station is changed.

3) And, on a less technical note, if you are familiar with GTA:VC, what are some of the call-outs you remember? Which ones would you put into your machine?

Thanks in advance, I am looking forward to additional input from the community to help me get this machine where I would like it!

I'm hoping to look a little further into doing something like this, I think.:
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/gottlieb-system-80b-raspberry-pi-soundboard-emulator
He even has some of the code there for a starting point. I *think* I'll be OK with using the original triggers, but that may change as I get further into the project.

Shows you how bad I am at this game, I figured it'd be for the initials but wasn't sure. Adding a 2nd set of switches on the 2 buttons wouldn't be the biggest hassle. I'll have to look a little closer at *how* I can have, say 5, stations running simultaneously and just move the unmute option between them. Wouldn't you be concerned with 5 audio processes running simultaneously dragging down the performance of the RaspPi or Aurduino?

Thanks for the input guys. Zacaj, pausing is exactly what I am trying to get away from. You lose the "radio" feel if the station stops when you aren't listening. I know it seems weird the RaspPi might not be able to handle the 5 or so songs playing simultaniously, but with 1GB of RAM being shared with the OS, there's a good chance it might cause some performance issues. My experience with RaspPi up until now is making a RetroPi, and anything released after SNES gets pretty rough. N64 games are almost entirely unplayable. Granted, most of the work is being done graphically, so here's to hoping I can get this to work. I love the idea using the interface board to make it plug-n-play. It would be so much cleaner.

nman, thanks for the links! Definitely some good stuff to go through. I'll have to see how many sounds the game has and how they are mapped to see how many options I can effectively use. Unfortunately, I think it'll wind up being pretty limited without adding a 2nd switch to each place I want a variety to come from, and possibly having to do a blend of the RaspPi and MP3 trigger system.

That's actually good to know. I'll have to look a little closer at the idea of changing the time codes and how to impliment it. With little coding knowledge, I have a feeling there will be a learning curve.

Anyone know if there is an easy way to map the various sounds, or is it simply just a matter of trial/error and going through each switch to see which sounds it activates? If that's the case, how can you distinguish which sounds are "overlap" and which ones are "independent"?

OK, so just as a point of clarification. Looks as if there are a total of NINE radio stations.. yikes. Hopefully doubling the running sound files from the original estimate won't overload the RaspPi as mentioned earlier. As I think about this a little further, I also need to determine the "when/how" the stations will play. Let's just say the buttons in front got wired correctly, and now we come down to "timing". Looking for suggestions/input. I originally considered having the stations as both attract enabled and game enabled but that seems messy, and could quickly get annoying if left for long periods with other music going in the arcade. If I made it in-game-only enabled, I'm guessing I'll have to add something in the code to increment a counter?

Thinking I'll put together a custom attract mode that occasionally tosses game taunts at you. Thinking one giant looping .wav file with pauses built in between taunts so it isn't one right after the other.

Then its a matter of going through and mapping the rest of the game sounds, which is probably going to REALLY suck, because there isn't a whole lot of variety in the sounds, so it's tough to tell if things are one single sound or several is succession. Will likely have to get the interface board created so I can see the debug built into the script.

I am starting to understand why these things take years to complete. Converting the machine will be fun, but painstakingly slow. I foresee many hours of work ahead.

Pretty much everything I have done with RaspPi has been on V3. If nothing else, the integrated wireless makes it so much easier to use. Even on the RaspPi 3, running games like Goldeneye on the N64 emulator just doesn't work, and it seems like it is a known issue. Theres info online about guys trying to overclock their RaspPi to get it to smooth out (to no avail that I know of).

Not a bad idea, adding in a timer that kicks in. It'll be interesting to see how the machine handles the various inputs. Looks like getting the bare bones set up will make mapping the sounds a bit easier using the debug. I can probably just use a bunch of sample sounds to create a more distinct variation between sounds to facilitate.

I did find .wav files of all 9 radio stations. I'll be checking them later today for sound quality to see if they are usable. Also found various sound boards I might be able to create sounds from.

You read my mind...