Cool!
--
Chris Hibler - CARGPB #31
http://ChrisHiblerPinball.com/Contact ... for board repairs
http://www.PinWiki.com - The Place to go for Pinball Repair Info

I looked at his development thread. Very cool.
I'd love to see a side-by-side between OEM and the repro board, with the same switch closures.
--
Chris Hibler - CARGPB #31
http://ChrisHiblerPinball.com/Contact ... for board repairs
http://www.PinWiki.com - The Place to go for Pinball Repair Info

Good idea! I put together a little video comparing the stock Bally Squawk & Talk sound board to my replacement version. The main difference is that the background is not interrupted when a sound or voice comes in. This isn't as noticeable with the normal background sound, but it IS with the Flash Gordon 15 second bonus "alarm" background.

I stumbled on this thread and the replacement S&T board as used in Flash Gordon with custom sounds is great.

I WILL be ordering one for Eight Ball Deluxe when it is available and now I NEED to get a FG again.

Check out this video.

I'm familiar with Pinball Browser. How different is it to insert custom sounds on your board? Is it something you could explain? I assume you don't see a code...

Do you just re-assign sounds with wav files? If so, approximately how many different sounds are on FG? If there are only 10, I could see some sounds getting fairly repetitive...

Just finished re-watching FG and there are so, so many great quotes and sounds that could now be included in this game. Great job on the board!

The Flash Gordon machine has 37 different sounds that are commanded from the machine's stock MPU. 2 of these are repeating backgrounds. 15 are voices (phrases). For my board, these are just simple WAV files on a MicroSD card. Pretty easy to change. But you'd want to keep the lengths similar so that the sound card knows what's playing and can shut things off for higher priority sounds (voices for example, are higher priority)

geeteoh, I just realized your call sign is a takeoff on GTO. Duh.

I love what you've accomplished. Very cool.
How did you create .wav files for the original sounds? Simple audio recording?

I posted this link on one of your YT videos:
https://www.coinopcauldron.com/squalkart.html

I also watched the video where you captured the sound command stream. Very cool.
I though that Clive's document indicated that S&T commands were more complex than simple "bit pattern and strobe" as is used on every other sound board interface. I thought Clive indicated that successive commands are needed to command some sounds.

Does this jive with what you know?

Chris

Very good. You're one of the first to figure it out. I have a 1969 GTO. The license plate is "geeteoh".

As far as how I record the sounds... In some of my videos, I show my S&T Tester board (shield for the Arduino Uno). I use this to step through all 256 sound commands with manual button presses. I can save the ones that work (along with their durations). When I got them all, I play them all back and record them into my laptop. I use Audacity with a nicer USB microphone. I then break up the recorded file into individual WAV files.

I looked at the waveforms from the MPU in detail with a logic analyzer. Once the MPU is powered, the only traffic is either solenoid or sound commands. I didn't see anything else.

There might be a couple of special commands (bit patterns) sent from the MPU when upon power up. If they exist, they would set up the volume and if the background is turned off or not. (items from the Audit menu). The background sound is always sent from the MPU even if turned off in the audit menu. So there is SOMETHING telling the S&T board not to play it. I tried to find startup special commands and decode them when I first started working with the S&T. I had no luck finding anything interesting or useful. Once powered though, there definitely aren't any special commands with the exception of sound command 250 which stops the background sound on some machines.

If there are special commands or waveforms, they are optional. My S&T tester only sends out the 8-bit sound commands and it works for four of the games at least (MMPM, Elektra, FG, and EBD). However.... Last week I tried out the Centaur ROMs. I cannot get these to play with my S&T tester. So - maybe this game needs some special boot commands? I'm going to put this in a machine with the Altek MPU set at Centaur to see if I can figure out what I'm doing wrong with this one.

Good idea. Very interesting!
--
Chris Hibler - CARGPB #31
http://ChrisHiblerPinball.com/Contact ... for board repairs
http://www.PinWiki.com - The Place to go for Pinball Repair Info

geeteoh This is awesome. Is this something that I could use on Embryon? Would be happy to help test/troubleshoot as needed. Cheers!

I may take you up on the offer. I work in Milwaukee during the week. I'll get a set of Embryon ROMs and get the sounds recorded in the coming weeks I need to test it on a real machine to properly get the background sound to start and stop. Each machine does it a little different. There might also be some other things that need alterations.

I'm working with another pinsider right now - Flash Gordon, Eight Ball Deluxe, and Vector next!!!!

Oh cool, yeah please do keep me posted. Happy to help out anytime.

Just a thought- I was thinking of building a Bally LISY-35 board for no other reason to replace the sound effects in Star Trek.

If you could make a Bally sound board for the early solid state pins that utilized MP3 files for sound I'd be first in line to buy one.

To do this effectively you'll have to delve into modifying Star Treks game code, especially if you want a background theme playing.

The Squawk and Talk board has it's own processor. It takes the load off the MPU boards processor for generating the sound effects. The MPU board game program just issues a sound/voice effect command and the S&T board then produces it leaving the MPU board processor free to take care of other business.

The early Bally sound boards are just programmable tone generators. The MPU board processor has to control the tone sequence on the fly to create the sound effects. i.e. it doesn't send out a command like the S&T system, rather it has to spit out a bunch of tone controls of variable length to the sound board.

For example, on Vector when you tilt, the MPU board sends out two nibbles for an 8 bit command ($44 hex) to the S&T board and the S&T board then produces the speech "Help Me!". It's simple enough to interpret.

When you tilt Star Trek, the MPU board has to progressively control the tones the sound board creates by sending out this sequence of 5-bit timed tone selection controls to the sound board:
$12, $18, $0F, $11, $17, $0F, $10, $16, $0F, $0E, $15, $0F, $0D, $14, $0F, $0C, $13, $0F, $0B, $12, $0F, $0A, $11, $0F, $09, $10, $0F, $08, $0E, $0F, $07, $0D, $0F, $06, $0C, $0F, $1F

As you can see the sound protocol is totally different and not so easy for simple interpretation.

But maybe geeteoh has some other ideas on how to take shortcuts.

Quench, you are correct. The code in the MPU would need to be custom in order to even communicate with the S&T. I believe the wiring is all there, just the commands wouldn't be recognized. I could re-write the communication to work - but you wouldn't have much of a custom sound opportunity with the stock MPU code as Quench pointed out.

When I release the next version of my replacement S&T board - with Eight Ball Deluxe, I will have a "Custom" game title available from the DIP switches which can help those making custom MPU code. It'll make it easier than trying to map sounds vs voices vs backgrounds to an existing game. This "custom" title will have them laid out a little more logical. And allow you to use all 255 addresses.

I came across your board due to my S&T for Embryon frying twice now and I'm fed up with it and am totally going to buy one of yours (probably before you even read this).

I do have a question about how you're capturing existing audio. Why not just capture the sound right from the audio output directly from your testing setup rather than the speaker and microphone technique (which are both coloring the actual sound the card is producing)? I should note I have a background in audio engineering, so I think of things like this. In no way could I make what you make

Anyway, thanks for what you do, you'll have my order soon!

In the end, I recorded the sounds two different ways. The speaker/microphone method is in my backup at sound bank 2. The primary sound banks 0 and 1 have a more direct method. There is no low-level audio out at the connectors - just the amplified speaker output. It probably can be attenuated for direct recording but I tapped into the board earlier and got a real clear sound signal to record. Xenon, on the other hand, both recording methods sound very similar.

It's hard to compare stock board sounds to mine - but the voices are either equal or better depending on the condition of the vintage S&T board.

Ron from Joe's Classic Arcades did a video comparing my board to the stock one in an Embryon. Sounds the same to me. Most of the commentors believe mine sounded better.

If you are going to change speakers. Make sure you use an 8-ohm speaker. A 4 ohm one will overheat my board. This one from amazon sounds really good with my board.

amazon.com link »

I have finally gone through all the S&T pinball games. My newest boards have the sound files and settings that support all 15 games (if you include Xenon). The printed manual that comes with each board is 64 pages long and has a section on the details for each of the 15 games. Bally used the S&T in a couple of other games - I have the roms for one - but probably won't release any support for them.

I have turned my attention now to the first Bally electronic sound machines. I'm using what I learned to offer custom plug-and-play sound boards for these machines. Way cool. Very popular. I have Star Trek and KISS done. I'm getting a Lost World this weekend. I want to cover Six Million Dollar Man, Globetrotters, and Supersonic as well. Not interested in creating one for Dolly or Playboy and not sure if I want a Paragon.

I have a really terrible desire to own all the Bally wide bodies, so it hurts my heart to hear you question Paragon that way

Really though, this is fantastic. I suppose I was jumping to conclusions assuming you hadn’t done this in the previous year that you’d posted, for that I apologize. This is a fantastic thing you’ve done here, and I greatly look forward to receiving the one I ordered last night.

For a while I desired to keep everything original, but that’s simply not gong to happen and I love being able to improve sound quality wherever possible.

Thanks again for all you do!!

Nothing against the Paragon theme or gameplay. It's just the "wide body" part. Worried about trying to get it out of someone's basement and trying to haul it home. Or moving it around. I have some of my games in my apartment where I work during the week. It's all in my head.

I understand the original vs modified too. My custom boards play a lot of the original sounds along with the custom items. Makes it so much fun to play. I actually now really enjoy these older Ballys and plan to purchase them instead of borrowing them for sound board development as I did with the S&T games.

I get this completely! All of my games are in my basement currently and it’s a fun time getting them in and out.

That said, I just moved an Attack From Mars remake out and it was a way bigger hassle than Space Invaders was, but that’s due to the head coming off easily, so it weighs less overall than AFM. I had to take the head off of Embryon as well, but since it’s hinged it’s not nearly as easy to do as SI, so that was indeed a bit of a hassle.

I have a set of Pin Skates that I use to shuffle around the 10 or so machines I have down there, but I found out the hard way they don’t work on Bally wide bodies (they work just fine on Gottlieb wide bodies such as the James Bond I have down here)

Pin Skates. I hadn't seen those before. I use four of the little 3-wheel dollies under all my machines. They work good but you can't get the machines close together. Learn new things every day.