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Phoenix audio.
#389752 - 01/29/21 04:32 PM
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Hello all.
I thought this would be an old subject, but I don’t see that many references to it upon a Google search.
It’s in regard to the audio output on Phoenix. You know, with anything that you love, things can imprint vividly in your mind, even from many years ago. Well, a local swimming pool that my father used to take us to every Sunday had a Phoenix machine, and I became really excited every weekend, knowing that we’d be going there. Not for the swimming (although that was great fun too), but mainly because I got to play Phoenix. This was a big deal at the time, because arcade machines weren’t common when I was a boy, unless we travelled to Blackpool (UK), which we did probably once a year.
Anyway, I digress. For whatever reason, one of the main things that always stuck in my head about the game was the siren like sound that the mother ship made as it dropped on to the screen, and it just isn’t accurate in MAME. It’s either in the opposite pitch to the original, ending up too high a note, making it really far away from how it should sound, or, on the version I have, it almost plays the correct note, but doesn’t get there accurately. The arcade original does a sort of does a quick down up down wave before it settles on the final note, if that makes sense?
I thought I was imagining it years back, when I first started using MAME about 20 years ago, and that maybe my memory of it was wrong, but I knew in the back of my mind that it wasn’t right. There are videos of the arcade machines on YouTube, and if you compare the sound I'm talking about on them videos to the one you get in MAME, you can tell the difference very clearly.
Is that something that sticks out to anyone else? Does anyone recall a very old version of MAME that was more accurate, because I’m sure that at some point, again going back some time, that I had a version that sounded right, and that possibly it was with a separate sample file that I downloaded. I could be mistaken about that though.
I did find some reference to this here : https://mametesters.org/view.php?id=3339
But it’s from 2009 and seems to have dried up after that.
Sorry for rambling...
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| gregf |
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Re: Phoenix audio
[Re: Eebobobo]
#389757 - 01/29/21 08:09 PM
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--
https://mametesters.org/view.php?id=3339
Gyrovision
All discrete sound effects were made possible by Derrick Renaud. Before that, the game had really bad sound in MAME....
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Gyrovision's explanation provides informative details about the analog audio sounds being played by Phoenix. I met Gyro in person in 2011 and talked with him quite a few times back in the long ago days. Gyro used to be a repair technician for a couple arcade places in northern Nevada a long time ago.
Derrick Renaud was working with a Centuri brand manual (logic schematics section) for Phoenix in which Derrick had commented that there were a fair amount of misprints and typos within the logic schematics. iirc Derrick jokingly described it as "worst schematics ever..."
I wasn't a fan of Phoenix so the audio sound effects I wouldn't be familiar with compared to say Gremlin Frogs, Carnival, Depthcharge etc.
Code within MAME
Going back to Nov. 2000 when Keith Wilkins added initial support for a centralized discrete audio section and Derrick Renaud eventually improved the system, it took some form of a generic method of shaping how the sounds would be generated instead of taking a low level approach of detail with components values outputs etc which is what couriersud has done using netlist variation that was added around 2011 iirc.
Keith's set up was done in way that avoided details because the code in MAME still
recognized the CPU itself as what everything revolves around. The old code in MAME
where it recognized the "CPU as king" somewhat placed constraints on analog emulation with audio support okay...anything else maybe not exactly okay. Aaron and contributors eventually restructured MAME to treat all components including the cpu as individual components that are pieced to a clean pcb (like a white plain canvass waiting to be painted; pcb getting components added on). This eventually meant non-cpu hardware items could then be eventually supported to MAME with help of couriersud's netlist support.
Back to Phoenix, with netlist now in use compared to previous centralized discrete logic system, it is now possible to support various model pcbs of Phoenix that might make use of different components than compared to Amstar's version. The issues will be having to search for various versions in which components might be different or the logic schematics might also be printed different depending how a company built their own variation of Phoenix. As for bootleg versions, it will come down to having to find specific pcbs and look over components and might have to trace everything to create logic schematics for a bootleg version of Phoenix.
Same thing will be needed for popular games with bootlegs such as Space Invaders and other popular bootlegged games.
As for external audio sample recordings used with old versions of MAME, there were limitations to that. Useful for single played sound effects such as crash sound effects, but for sounds that play a continuous tone that fluctuates or goes from low to high or high to low...external audio sample files would not be possible such as the motor sound effect used with Kee Games Sprint 2 or other Atari versions of Sprint racing games from 1970s era.
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