Cinematronics Audio Board repair

Someone was asking me a few months ago if I could repair a Cinematronics audio board, specifically an Armor Attack. I had to say no because I was too busy at the time. Also, I own a few Star Castle boards, an Armor Attack board, a Rip Off board, A Solar Quest board, and a Space War board but the condition of none of them is known. I own a restored Star Castle but I didn't want to mess with it at all, especially just for the sake of repairing some other boards. It's not that hard to swap the board panel but it is very hard to troubleshoot a boardset within a cab, especially if the control panel doesn't match the game being tested.

Anyways, fixing Cinematronics audio boards is something that I am now setup to do quickly and relatively easily. I just today completed building a new custom PC attached electronic controller box for Cine audio boards. What I do is plug the audio board into a new wiring harness that I made for my workbench to hook it up to power, a speaker, and a volume pot. Then the ribbon cable plugs into my new little controller box. The controller box plugs into the PC serial comport. Then I launch a custom application that I created in Visual Basic 6. The app connects to the box and presents a variety of controls such as buttons and checkboxes. You click on these controls to make the board produce any of its sounds on demand.

There's a droplist from which you can choose from 6 Cine games...
-Armor Attack
-Star Castle
-Rip Off
-Space Wars
-Solar Quest
-Tail Gunner

When you select a specific game from the droplist, all of the checkboxes and buttons are instantly relabeled to match the selected game. Buttons allow you to "fire" certain sounds and turn other continuous sounds on and off (such as ship thrust or tank engine or space mine). Some sounds are automatically automated such as the "chopper" sound in Armor Attack. Also for Armor Attack, there is a slider for tank speed. In Star Castle, the slider operates the level of the pulsating background sound.

I have only completed the Windows application code for AA and SC so far and it's working great. It only takes an hour or two to add the functions for another game now that the basic system is complete and working. I'll probably have them all working in a couple of weeks.

I have at least 1 each of all of the boards except Tail Gunner to develop the program with. If anyone has a TG audio board lying around that they don't need/want, then I'd like to get it.

Being able to plug the audio boards into this system on my bench and trigger each sound on demand is a significant and valuable troubleshooting aid. No CCPU board or game controls are required.

If anyone has any Cine audio boards that they want fixed, I could probably provide a repair service for the cost of parts, some labor, and shipping both ways. I only wish it was so easy to build something like this for the CCPU board !

William Boucher

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Received on Thu Sep 11 19:25:51 2008