Episode 141: Spur of the Moment
Bonus episode, WARNING: this one is fairly boring/technical but might be interesting to some arcade/pinball people
So I had noticed a while back when playing emulated TZ (pinball arcade) that the jackpot sound effect was just... wrong? It didn't match my memory of playing TZ as a kid. I figured it was because of the emulation and because its not original hardware. As you all know Ive only recently gotten my TZ to the point where it can be play tested. I was not too shocked to find out that my game too plays the "wrong" jackpot sound. (since it is running a Pinsound board, although with the original sound pack)
Here is how the original sounded that my brain wants to hear:
And here is the emulated sound and my game:
Since I'm lucky enough to have a Pinsound board, In theory I can just find or create a recording of the correct sound and make my game use it. so here was the question:
Is this a result of emulation, or was the official sound changed in a ROM revision?
If its a rom revision, when the switch was made? and for the game trivia buff in me, why?
After some research I landed on the program M1 and BridgeM1 its GUI/frontend counterpart. The purpose of M1 is to emulate sound chips and play arcade sounds/music right off the rom / rom chip. Twilight zone was on the supported game list so I was excited! Unfortunately I couldn't get it to make any sound at all, though the program seemed to think it was working.
Next I found a tutorial in which someone imported RAW rom data into Audacity. I had more success with this method and was able to actually listen to some of the sound effects after slowing them down enough, unfortunately the sound we are interested was not one of them, and the rest played as screechy nonsense.
Lastly I was pointed at PinMame which is the arcade emulator that Visual Pinball interfaces with to actually run the game code. I was informed that PinMame had a sound command menu where you could send sound commands to the game and it would respond as it would if it received those commands from the game code. This is perfect! exactly what I had been looking for. After screwing with it for an hour (and studying the work of pinsider @Alby87) I had my answer:
The jackpot sound effect is actually 3 separate sound effects in the sound rom: The build up (which we knew was separate and not an issue), and TWO sound effects that combine (play over each other at the same time) for the second half/crashes. The pinsound and pinball arcade use the SFX at memory address F8, but they do NOT layer the other half over it (at address 7a0d) The sound effect was never changed, it was just HALF ripped a few times.
In addition, it is important that these two sound effects be played at the same time ON THE CHIP as they interact with each other and produce a unique sound that cannot be achieved by simply playing both sound effects at once in an audio editing software or platform like Pinsound.
Armed with this knowledge I wrote a sound command to the chip to play both of these sound effects at the same time. This resulted in the correct sound in the end which was then recorded. Unfortunately, PinMames emulation is not perfect, and so the sound is still a little off (especially the timing on the two SFX in relation to each other) but recording this was good enough to restore the original sound in such a way that doesn't make me cringe!
Thanks to The Pinside Twilight Zone community and Alby87 foir their help on this.