RE: Cinematronics sound board behavior...

>
> With MP3 players and digital cameras driving the price of SmartMedia cards
> down I'm back to thinking that maybe a brute-force sample player
> board might
> be the way to go for adding sound to the Sega G-80 multigame and possibly
> the Cinematronics Multigame as well.
>
> All the more I'm thinking is a Scenix PIC clone (probably 50MHz), a Smart
> Media card (16MByte?), and a 10 or 12 bit DAC. (This gives me a perfect
> excuse to buy a Scenix dev kit which I've been dying to play with. ;-)
>
> I can grab the data from the Smart Media card, "mix" it in the Scenix, and
> pump it out to a serial DAC for playback.
>
> Just wondering how many "voices" I need to make so I can
> guestimate load on
> the Scenix. (If anything the bottleneck might be getting data from the
> SmartMedia card, it's actually a pretty fast interface though...)

Alas, the brute force approach looses some key qualities from games like
Star Castle. Remember, some of the analog oscilliators have VERY long
attack and decay cycles. The droning effect as the background changes pitch
during the game is absolutely essential to the Star Castle experience.

How flexible is the DAC to modify waveforms on the fly? The core oscillator
response is fairly constant, just have to mimic the effect of slow charging
capacitors (stretch and bend).

Of course, I'll be the last to complain for a brute force solution that gets
us 90% there ;-) Just make sure there are some trigger out lines and some
audio lines coming back into the mixer (you can probably count the non-brute
forcible analog signals on one hand)

Ray
Received on Tue Jun 22 19:19:05 1999