[sdiy] SuperZaxxon

[Andre Majorel]

On 2002-10-04 20:45 -0500, Paul Schreiber wrote:

> From last post: Look at page 4 of the PDF schematic for Super
> Zaxxon.  It's like a TR-808! Every sound effect has an analog
> "synth", based on noise, twin-T filters and a sequencer using
> some '393 counters to "chain" the individual effects together.
> Many of these older games used discrete analog circuits in the
> sound generation.

As is the shooting sound for Galaxian and Moon Cresta. From the
emulation in Mame, (which is quite faithful as far as I
remember) :

  http://www.teaser.fr/~amajorel/misc/galaxian.wav.gz
  http://www.teaser.fr/~amajorel/misc/galaxian.ogg

This one is interesting because it sounds different from (better
than) the square waves and grainy noise generators that were
often used. At the time I was very impressed, and tried to
duplicate it on a GI 8912.

Another good sounding arcade hardware of the day was the Namco
board, used by Pac Man, Galaga and many others. It was a wave
table design with 32 samples per table and 4 bits of resolution
(beats the PPG <g>). They cramed 8 waveforms in a 256-byte PROM.
Galaga shows how the developers often took advantage of the
ability to have a full range of timbres in the same game. The
results were quite musical, if lo-fi.

-- 
André Majorel <amajorel at teaser.fr>
http://www.teaser.fr/~amajorel/