I have a really strange issue I just ran into on a Williams Flash. The thing works but after awhile the sound will die. I eventually figured out the upgrade to the board that joins pin 39 and 40 of the PIA hadn't been done (those two pins weren't connected)... but after connecting them, now everything works fine, but eventually only the background sound will die.

While some of you will consider that an improvement, i've been swapping some chips trying to track it down. Here's the weird part. The rectangular sound board calls for a 6802 in the schematics, this board had a 6808 socketed on it. It was working... but there is no ram chip on the early System 4 Williams sound board (the rectangle one)... so they're using the internal ram in the 6802.

This board was running, pretty much, with a MC6808P. Interestingly, the second Williams sound board (the square one) has provisions for a 6808 because there is a ram on the board.

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So all that to say, the background sound, sounds different with a 6808 in than a 6802. The drone noise that gets higher as you get more points, also has a walking 'down' type note in it. Swapped the 6808 with a 6802 and now the background sounds are fine. I'm not sure if they'll still drop out.

My whole thing is, how was it working with no ram? The test button worked... and the selects from the MPU in the backbox worked, you could play a game it would just drop the background sound out from time to time. when the ball drained the background sound would come back on. The background sound would usually drop out if there were a lot of sounds being triggered, maybe it was running out of the nonexistent ram????

interesting.... thank you. This is a motorola branded one, but I can see what you're saying, maybe that's a 6802 and since it failed some test they just sold it as a 6808....

I'm suspicous that maybe this 6808 originally came off a 'square' board at some repair guy's stash and he swapped it on there not realizing they're slightly different designs....

So it could even be that Motorola saved all those up ands old a big batch of them to Williams for their square sound boards since they could be jumpered to work with 6808's.

One of the hard things to understand is, today, a 6808 and 6802 cost about the same... but back then, there may have been a big difference in the price...

I made a little video playing it, you can see with the 6808 in it, the background noise has a counter melody in it. Swap a 6802 in it, and it sounds like it usually sounds. You can't leave this particular 6808 in though because it will crash the background sound after awhile if a bunch of stuff starts going on. This is the Phantom of the Opera edition apparently....