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After several months of research, I have reverse engineered the sound ROM for Sinistar and got the stereo sound from the cockpit cabinet implemented in MAME. I made a 50-minute documentary explaining how the assembly code works and how the game uses different synth routines to generate the various sound effects, as well as talking about the Williams software engineers behind the code like Eugene Jarvis, Sam Dicker, Mike Metz, John Kotlarik, Tim Murphy and Kristina Donofrio. Thanks to @braedel and @aeroflott for their help. If Brad didn't rescue the cockpit sound ROM, none of this would've happened. You can watch the video here:


When I submitted my stereo sound code to MAME, the MAME devs refused to implement my code correctly and as a result, the emulated stereo sound shows up as mono. However, I am happy to report that after I made my video, the devs implemented speaker placement controls in the emulator so that the audio can be routed correctly (though I have yet to try this out).

I also am working on a more balanced version of Sinistar, after looking at the leaked source code and understanding more of how the enemy population tables work and how fast enemies are spawned into the sector. For those that are interested, here are my work-in-progress notes on how the difficulty in Sinistar works: