For the past few months I’ve been tinkering with my Midway Haunted House gun game. One of the items on my project list is game sound; the tape player ate my 8-track tape at some point & the belt that drives the tape player is broken. Pinball Pal used to sell replacement tapes and belts, but from what I’ve read that site is no longer operational.
So I found this sound card made by Robertsonics and sold by Sparkfun, the “Wav Trigger”. The card has 16 triggers that can be engaged by a physical switch. Switches can be configured to play .wav files from a Micro SD card, increase or decrease volume, or stop all sound playback. Multiple .wav files (up to 14) can play at the same time and each trigger can be configured to play multiple sounds (random or sequential) if desired. In my case, Haunted House sounds can be downloaded in .mp3 format. I converted them to .wav files and split into individual tracks. I used Audacity (free download) to do the conversion and clean-up some of the static in the .mp3 file sounds…
The sound card comes with software to program each trigger. Basically I have the first switch configured to play the background sound, the second switch randomly plays one of the three cat sounds, the third switch randomly plays one of the 34 monster sounds, the fourth switch randomly plays one of the 42 witch sounds, the fifth switch stops all sound, and the 6th and 7th switch are volume controls. I have 9 switches left! I could use another switch to add gunshot sounds and coin-up sounds but right now I am only working with stock sounds from the original game 8-track.
At this point I’ve added two leaf switches to the game over relay. One triggers the background music when a the game over relay is off, and the other stops all sounds when the game over relay is engaged. I am planning to add leaf switches to the ‘witch hit’, ‘cat hit’, and ‘monster hit’ relays to play those sounds respectively, but my game still isn’t working so I cannot test that yet…
I just wanted to post this so that others could benefit from it. You could use the card to add sounds to any EM game… You need to provide your own power source (6-12vDC), a Micro SD card to hold the sounds, and I soldered some header pins to the board so that I could make a plug for my wiring harness from the card to my leaf switches. The card costs $50. Here’s a link:
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12897
and here’s a video I made, bench testing my card with Haunted House sounds:
So far the only limitation I have found is that you cannot loop sounds. So in my case, if a game lasts longer than the background music (162 seconds) the sound would stop. You could overcome this by creating a large .wav file that loops the background sound… All of my .wav files combined are only 27mb and my Micro SD card is 16gb, so I could afford to loop it many times but I don’t think it’s an issue for me since games probably won’t last that long.
I’m not affiliated with Robertsonics or Sparkfun, just passing along info.