Berzerk/Star Wars voice technology

Level42

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Just because I'm curious: Do we know anything about how the encoding of those very early samples were done ? I'm sure there were some clever techniques necessary in those days seeing that f.i. the Berzerk voice board only has two 16kbit ROMs, which means only 4kByte of space.

I'm pretty sure the voice "samples" are not really samples right ? I mean, there's simply not enough memory to hold those samples. There must be some encoding going on.

I'm pretty sure MAME simply uses samples that were recorded from original hardware and playing it back at the right times, because that's much easier to do than to completely emulate the voice synth chip etc.

It would be fun if it were possible to record your own samples for those games (just for a laugh).
 
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Just because I'm curious: Do we know anything about how the encoding of those very early samples were done ? I'm sure there were some clever techniques necessary in those days seeing that f.i. the Berzerk voice board only has two 16kbit ROMs, which means only 4kByte of space.

I'm pretty sure the voice "samples" are not really samples right ? I mean, there's simply not enough memory to hold those samples. There must be some encoding going on.

I'm pretty sure MAME simply uses samples that were recorded from original hardware and playing it back at the right times, because that's much easier to do than to completely emulate the voice synth chip etc.

It would be fun if it were possible to record your own samples for those games (just for a laugh).

When MAME uses external sample packages to produce sound for a game, it's usually due to a few possibilities:

1) The game had something external to hold recorded music or sound snippets. Devices such as Cassette players or even 8-Track players were used in very early games. Some examples of such games are Journey, Triple Hunt, Thief, NATO Defense, Shark Attack. Since you can't really emulate such things, an external sample packs is the only route to allow the proper audio.

2) As in the examples you mentioned, there is speech produced in certain games. This, especially in early games, was not any type of 'sample' format. Such games used a speech synthesizer driven by a CPU, to produce spoken word for those games. The data wasn't speech, but phonetic codes which were fed to the speech synthesizer as needed to produce the voices or other effects. Such examples are games you mentioned as well as a load of other Atari Games throughout the 80's. Q*Bert, Gorf/Wizard of War are prime examples of synths not being emulated and requiring external samples to allow voices in MAME at the current time.

3) A board has Discrete components. Such games are possible to simulate to a high degree, which MAME takes advantage of in many cases. Most early games have some or all sound produced by discrete components. Others many include a combination of CPU driven audio chips as well as discrete filtering or sound effects production. This is probably the most common reason for external sample usage in MAME.

Hope that info helps.
 
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