MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat

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...