MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: centralized discrete audio system

There has been some discrete audio in only a couple of the games (Asteroids or Galaxian) as an example. Each was in a separate driver file. Maybe one or two games at most had used code to mimic the discrete components. A vast majority had no audio sounds, and a few had made use of external audio samples recorded from cabs such as Boot Hill, but mainly many of the "emulated in MAME before year 2000" 1970s era games were missing all audio sounds.

Going way back to when old MAME.net was the show then and Gridle might do daily updates, Keith Wilkins had begun a centralized discrete audio system in which components would be in discrete section and various driver files would access the discrete section.

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http://mamedev.org/history.html

Daily Work-in-Progress 1999-2004

http://mamedev.org/oldwip/wip0011.html

2000-11-07
Keith Wilkins sent in a preliminary version of discrete sound system emulation, not supporting any game yet.

http://mamedev.org/oldrel.html

http://mamedev.org/releases/whatsnew_037b11.txt

0.37 BETA 11

Source:
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- Some support for discrete component sound emulation. [Keith Wilkins]

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It was a great idea, but lol...whereas Atari Fire Truck did have audio sounds and was okay with what Keith rewrote in spring 2001...Asteroids discrete audio sounds took a huge dive and Asteroids sounds were never fixed until Derrick Renaud helped update Asteroids in 2003 along with Keith rewriting centralized discrete audio section.

A fair amount of MAME followers would continually ask "when would Asteroids sounds be fixed?"

So .37b11 would be when Keith's centralized discrete audio was first added. You would need to look in spring 2003 for when Derrick and Keith rewrote centralized discrete audio system and went from spring 2003 to what it currently is.

*offtopic*

I remeber this too and the uproar it caused. LOL iirc It may have been CPS-2 games fans that were doing most of the complaining about this interfering with CPS-2 game play. And this was at a time when many of the CPS-2 hardware games had yet to be found, dumped and Xors created by Razoola. Oh those days when kidz would continually ask "when will [name favorite cps-2 game] be emulated".

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http://mamedev.org/releases/whatsnew_037b14.txt

0.37 BETA 14

Changes to the main program:
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- Changed 4-way emulation on a 8-way joystick to "sticky" mode. This makes
Lady Bug and other 4-way games more playable.
Explanation here: http://www.rentrondesign.homestead.com/JoyPrimer.html
[Jeoff Krontz]
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