RE: Cinematronics sound board behavior...

> Then you obviously haven't downloaded Retrocade and played Star Castle on
> it. It's dead on with the original machine from a recording of one I got.
> Thanks Zonn for the samples...
>
The G-80 games in MAME are my reference. They're pretty good, but there are
problems with the Universal Sound Board games (Star Trek, Tac/Scan). I'd
think things like Cinemat games would be easier to handle since the sound
cards aren't fully programmable like the usb...

> No... use 16 bit samples and downsample them to the DAC size. It'll give
> you a better signal to noise ratio. 8 Bit samples really sound like crap.
>
I agree with you in theory, but I don't really want the overhead of 16 bit
samples. I'm not keen on dropping real DSP down on the board, and
retrieving a 16 bit sample from my serial NAND flash takes twice as long.
Most all the real arcade game cabinets have (at best) marginal speakers (and
at worst horrible ones) anyway. (And few arcade games fom pre '92 or so
originate audio at 8 bits or less.)

> The actual Star Castle droning that I have is a single phase cycle which
> lasts for about a quarter of a second and I just adjust the playback rate
> to adjust the pitch. Works *VERY* well.
>
That sure sounds like it'd work to me. ;-)

> > Particularly since most fx are going to be a few hundred milliseconds--
> > probably only 10-20K bytes. I doubt even *all* the Cinemat games have
> more
> > than 100 unique sounds... Probably more like 50-60?
>
> And a lot of them are duplicated, too. Like the explosion in Space Wars
> (at least one of them) is the same as the explosion in Solar Quest, and
> Star Castle.
>
Ahhhh. Good to know. Less memory is almost always cheaper. Volume ramp is
at 16Mbyte on SmartMedia, but 8M cards are still cheaper.

-Clay
Received on Wed Jun 23 10:47:17 1999