>Does MAME still support samples for unemulated sound hardware? It might be possible to >isolate the various sound elements from the video.
MAME does have support for external audio samples, but it would have to be simple single sound effects like a crash sound or explosion sound. Some of the sounds that can be heard from blinddog's Guided Missile videoclip are more complex and couldn't really be captured as external audio samples imo.
Any audio samples would likely not be supported because the logic schematics for Guided Missile are available and the preference would be have audio emulated rather than relying on external audio samples.
There is one example that is an excpetion and that is Midway Gun Fight's "hit" sound effect. Gun Fight still uses an external sample while Midway Boot Hill's "hit" sound effect is actually emulated.
The reason why Boot Hill "hit" sound effect is emulated and Gun Fight's "hit" sound effect uses an external sample recording is because Gun Fight uses many more transistors and capacitors just like Sea Wolf while later games including Boot Hill do not use as many resistors and capacitors.
Derrick Renaud had mentioned it would take a lot more time to properly determine how the sound effects are generated for early era Midway games (Gun Fight and Sea Wolf). Derrick used lots of test gear in order to determine exact voltage output for many of the sound effects and then spent time having to do the coding and testing to ensure sounds are nearly identical.
Derrick and Zsolt V. had time to work on the simpler Midway 8080 hardware games to get audio emulated. Gun Fight and Sea Wolf require much more time than they both had.
I believe Guided Missile will have audio fully emulated, but it may be a while until couriersud returns and does do more additions of various discrete components support.