Intellivision Stereo/Surround Mod

[retromod]

watch out youtube for the Intellivision Stereo/Surround Mod demo video. Search for "Intelllivision Audio Mod".

 

A full working prototype will be available soon at ebay and later this year a local dealer will offer additional devices.

See http://www.retrovideogamer.co.uk/ for pictures.

 

[+SoulBuster]

Link is dead

[+intvsteve]

Link is dead

Is this the right one?

 

http://www.retrovideogamer.co.uk/index.php?topic=3345.msg49347#msg49347

[Intymike]

Sounds like someone is playing in the bathroom.

[retromod]

Yes that is the right link.

 

Well different devices outputs the youtube video with different audio settings. For example it sounds ugly on my iphone because the player in youtube increases the volume to max from player side. Ensure the player volume is set to normal.

Else you have noise in the output as on every device (even a hifi system has noise if you increase volume).

[+Lathe26]

Even at normal volume, there is a huge amount of hiss in the audio. However, the echo effect is interesting.

[retromod]

Ok, the youtube player and the os soundlevel differs. As told problem is that there is some noise in the background which you can not hear until your volume level is so loud that neightbor rings. I ve noticed on some devices youtube increases the volume automatically so the volume level is high even your volume settings are low for os. I have that on my iphone and sometimes on my ipad. Reloading the video solves it sometimes. Not sure why this happens as video level volume is 50 percent during creation. On my pc with volume level dropped to 50 percent for os the player itself starts with 100 percent and sometimes with same volume level. In case of same level the video sound is ok, same if i play the original video locally.

If someone has a solution let me know.

 

In realitty the sound is only noisy if you have automatic volume adjustment enabled on your tv as the logic behind interprets the switch on of the console as low volume and increases it leading to steady noise. Same during some movies if there are long period of silences. Thats why i switched it off on tv.

 

The noise itself comes from the ad/da process of the soundprocessor. As it has limited sample rate it has some misleading tones like in mp3 files during feed. As told during normal operation you do not hear or notice it. The audio is amazing in comparison to normal mono loudspeaker output. Until you increase volume to be too loud (on my tv in he middle of the total possible volume, but at this point you must cry to each other to notice what the other player tries to tell you and may be the neighbor is also on the door )

[+BBWW]

Tough crowd this morning. Hats off to everyone who works on new things for the intellivision.

[AtariBrian]

The hallway echo sounds really bad , no offense .

[bikeguychicago]

I'm not really a fan. It has a reverberation to the sound that I don't really care for. Plus with my knowledge of how certain games sound on un-modified hardware, the effects of the mod just seem to make the games sound 'wrong', in my opinion.

[retromod]

Hi bikeguychicago, have you details which one sounds "wrong". I'm really interested to improve the quality for each console. The board contains a switch so you are able to modify some features or disable it completely. nearly 100 devices are spread to collectors and gaming fans and only two complained about noise which finally was incorrect settings of their tv set. Intellivision is a new mod so collecting experience is important. The you tube video quality is worser than in real life as it amplifies the volume in some way and add noise due to the already digitized output of the mod. The video is sampled with lower bandwidth considerations so audio and video quality is stripped down, too (else the overall video size will dramatically increasing).

 

I compared and demonstrated the games to some friends and they were quite satisfied with the results, specially as the output sounds "bigger" using the single effects. Frog bog, Donkey Kong for example or Space Spartians with Intellivoice. Also Pitfalls and Frogger get big improvements. There are other games where I noticed sound will be dropped a little bit which seems to be due to audio filtering. But for those games simple deactivate the mod on the back of the console. The mod makes no sense for all kind of games of course.

Edited January 10, 2014 by retromod

[retromod]

The hallway echo sounds really bad , no offense .

the mod in activated state makes no sense for some games. For example pitfall on Atari 2600 sounds terrible with the mod due to the used effects (could be due to the pitfall stereo approach already implemented by the programmers) but others like Deamon Attack have improved output. For those games simple deactivate the mod by the switch on the back.