Re: cine sound board

At 03:49 PM 6/23/97 -0500, you wrote:
>> At 01:55 PM 6/23/97 EDT, you wrote:
>> >In message "Re: cine sound board", you write:
>> >
>> >> While we're on the Cine. Sound board topic, the "Wideband Noise
>> >> Generator" used in Warrior looks to be the same one used in Sundance, so
>> >> add that to the list of Cine. Sound boards that use the noisy
>> >> semiconductors. What do we have so far? Space Wars, Sundance, Warrior
>> >> and possibly TailGunner. What about the other Vectorbeam stuff? Anyone
>> >> have Star Hawk and/or Spead Freak manuals around?
>> >
>> >I have a TG boardset at home and Cosmic Chasm and Space Wars manuals...
>>
>> Does your Space Wars manual have a copy of the sound card schematic? My
>> don't. I'd be interested in a copy of yours, if it does.
>>
>> Does anybody have the schematic for Space Wars sound card?
>
> Of course, I can use a copy of those Space Wars sound board schematics too!
>
> I helped a guy move his Space Wars a couple of months ago, and I saw the
sound board and it's really sparse. If I couldn't get a hold of a schematic
I was just going to try to reverse-engineer the schematics from the sound
board.

According to a guy that used to work at Cinematronics, they did something
slightly different in Space Wars, they bought a bunch of surplus "leaky"
transistors and used the "leakiness" to generate the white noise.

The problems they had were: (And a quick history of Cinematronics noise
generators as told by an ex-employee.)

Repeatability -- every machine has a different sound, though these
generators had the best explosion sounds!

Not working -- Sometimes the transistors didn't "leak" properly, there's a
bias adjustment on the card to allow adjusting the current.

Supply -- Where do you get a constant supply of defective transistors?

This is why they went to the zener diode circuitry. You can always find
zener diodes that breakdown. There designed to breakdown at their voltage
rating.

The zener diode circuit requires a few op-amps, and they also didn't always
sound the same. That's why they went with the digital approach.

The pseudo random square waves always sounded the same, needed little glue
logic, took less board space.

They became hard to get. That's why their later game "Solar Quest" had the
pseudo noise generator as discreet logic.

-Zonn
Received on Mon Jun 23 14:25:19 1997