Resolder the header or replace it. The pitch is set via this input and if its missing a bit, the pitch is off.

Easy way to check is to swap the speech processors from one to the other to make sure it's not the speech chip. Flight 2000's speech all is the same pitch, they never vary it. There can be variations on the speech processors themselves, as with any analog circuitry - but swapping it will tell you straight off. Usually when there is garbage in the speech it could be a timing issue, but AFAIK that timing is internal to the speech chip, not something external although I could be wrong about that.

At some point I along with a couple other people are going to come up with a replacement for this card with a wav trigger type setup, because the speech is known for all games that use it at this point, and I'm in the process of documenting all the pitch changes from the 6 or so games that use it currently as well so that corresponding wav files can be created.

I remember the year 2000 hype in the 90s with everything getting '2000' pegged onto it. Let's let DickHamill keep his 2020 monikers on his arduino modded games.

If you look at the artwork on the backglass it does seem like rather a depressing story, either she's in suspended animation and drifting in space, or that's a space coffin. People tried to escape earth because not only was THOR ANGERED from Lightning, the Meteor has also struck the earth, scattering humanity to the stars. Luckily, there's Space Wizard shooting pool with planets to help(?) out.....

Bruce Lee could always dragonfist the bad guys, as well.

I think Meteor was based on the 70s disaster movie. Logo/title typeset matches. I have a blu ray copy of that I have not watched yet. Supposedly was a bit of a box office flop. I enjoy some of the other disaster movies like Towering Inferno and Poseiden Adventure tho.
919oxhYoVmL._SL1500_ (resized).jpg

Black Hole isn't based on the movie though. Also it was over a year after Meteor came out.

I should watch Meteor, but it might ruin my love for the game. I'm sure they fire rockets when they get to level 7 at the Meteor to deter it from the Earth.

Zardoz is not crap, take it back! I watched it recently and found it to be fun movie.

I like bad movies for some reason so I will have to check out Meteor.

Oh, that could happen at some point. Too bad the speech board cuts into the regular sound although I think all early solid states do it that way don't they?

In case the issue isn't caused by a header signal, you may want to look at replacing C27. I do not believe this is included in the Big Daddy cap kit.
This cap effects the 555 IC trigger/threshold cycle time which is used to clock the speech chip.

Seems so. Firepower silences out all the sounds before talking. System 11 is the first ones I can think of that talk on top of other sounds. I feel like they could do it in earlier WMS games unless there is some kind of hardware reason the PIA cannot control the speech stuff and the DAC at the same time.

Same with Stern but the speech is so low quality in Stern games its hard for me to understand what words are spoken so adding sound on top of that would really lose it. Like in lightning I can understand about every third word spoken.

That's just lightning's speech choices. When I had one I had to do a lot of research into Norse mythology to just try and figure out what the words were. The rest of the games should be pretty easy to understand.

It's kind of why I haven't been actively working on the sample based card, I have working speech cards for all my machines that currently use them. But I want to add the capability to other titles; I'll be using a real card to pursue that, but unless I can get a supply of the cards/chips, I'll have to compromise on something in that future endeavor. There could always be crowd-sourced sample sets that the wav player could substitute to get some analog-y variation.

The same dilemma exists within other communities regarding synthesized stuff - the SID chip on the C-64 is a prime example, while people have recreated it on FPGA's, it's just not the same as the originals, and even among the originals, there's different variants that sound different and some are prized over others.

I don't have much experience with the Stern speech card but the Bally speech chip varies chip to chip in regards to speech pitch. Some are more like darth vader others more like the chipmunks. Analogue stuff probably sensitive to small variances in capacitance and resistance much more so than digital.

The in limbo SB-100 replacement project Quench helped me incorporate a circuit to be able to trigger MP3s. That circuit could be chopped out of the SB100 to be stand alone way to get eight triggers (data bus) out of the an address through the J5 plug. Could apply the same idea to the lamp address/lamp data/lamp strobe 2 so not to get int the way of a SB300.

That's a way I was triggering my defunct wav player in 2012 for Lost Vegas, grab the byte like the sb100 did. Something in the circuit would 'go to sleep' though and I was never able to debug it (and the wind really came out of the sails with all the delays in LV.... I think it's still listed on CPR's pages, but it's pretty much a dead project at this point).

Any replacement vsu100 solution of course is going to just operate exactly like the original for plug n play capability. In an ideal world I'd have gobs of the card to play around with, but that's not going to happen.

C27 is 470 pF

If they replaced that cap previously, they may have used one with a high tolerance - not good for timing.
Since it is a timing circuit, use a 5% part such as a C0G/NPO type cap.

Cap kits normally contain electrolytic caps. It is unusual to contain ceramics since they don't fail as often as electrolytics.

Does it look like C27 had been previously replaced? And what are the part markings on it (if you can see them)?

Yeah, that looks like an original glass encapsulated cap. Not real common for these to fail ... but once in a blue moon I suppose. I have seen failures of ceramic caps due to being physically abused (broken, cracked, etc) or by being subjected to lots o'voltage but seldom a random electrical failure.

If you've got access to a scope,you could verify the frequency coming out of that 555.
Taking a look at the control voltage going into the 555 during speech (pin 5) may also be a way to verify if the mux chip is working correctly

The factory soldering on that speech card is pretty bad. Zooming in around the chips it even looks like some of them are dry and possibly cracked. I'd inspect the board well. Double check the work around the 555 chip... like make sure no plated holes got ripped out when that chip was replaced. Previous rework is always on the top of the list of usual suspects.

Untitled (resized).png

That was supposed to be a 470 PICO farad cap, you said uF in the video.... did you do pF and just say the wrong one since most of the we're dealing with micro fard?

The higher pitch one is too high that's for sure. Your mpu200 clock speed might be higher as well because the regular sound on yours seems different as well, this isn't a big deal a lot of games have some variations there. I had 2 EBD's at one point and one of them the voice just sounded WRONG to me, so that's the S&T board that went with that one when it was sold and I kept the one that sounded "right".

If you need a 470 pF, I have a bunch of small value caps. I can throw one in an envelope and mail it to you. Just let me know.

if you have any junker MPUs laying around there is a bunch of 470pF caps on it. The ones near MPU J1