Re: Cinematronics sound board behavior...

On Tue, 22 Jun 1999 15:05:07 -0500 (CDT), you wrote:

>On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Ray Ghanbari wrote:
>
>> Solar Quest has the most complicated sound board. Not sure how many
>> independant signals are mixed in though.
>>
>
> More complicated than Boxing Bugs? I never did get a chance to
>look over the schematics to the BB sound board, but it is huge (the
>board itself.)
>
> If I'm mistaken, then my next vote would be for Solar Quest,
>as well.

I'm currently finishing up a PC-driven sound board testing software
(you hook up the sound board to a parallel port on the PC). It was
put on hold when I was told I had to move. It allows you to play
single sounds (or multiple sounds, whatever you want, it's menu
driven.).

To get it to work I've had to go through reverse engineering each
board, and write drivers to toggle each sound.

It's not done, or I'd have it on the net. It runs 7 or 8 games. And
if anyone's interested in the unfinished product let me know and I'll
stick it on the homepage. Unfortunately it's going to be a month or
two before I can get back to it. It does make fixing sound boards a
lot easier!

Back to the point. Boxing Bugs and Solar Quest use the same interface
(I'll use the same driver for each board, Solar Quest is supported, I
haven't put in Boxing Bugs yet.), though only the music generator is
shared between the two. All the other sounds are different.

There are a couple of unused lines on Solar Quest, that control sounds
on Boxing Bugs. And the sounds in Boxing Bugs are quite a bit more
complex in many cases. So Boxing Bugs is the most complicated sound
board with the most sounds, followed by Solar Quest, then probably
Armor Attack for complexity though the number of sounds is not all
that high in Armor Attack. Then they start getting similar in numbers
of sounds, with Space Wars probably being the simplest.

-Zonn
Received on Tue Jun 22 15:59:41 1999