ECS music synthesizer question

atari5200dude82 · May 16, 2015

Hi ladies and dudes. I Just scored a Intv music synthesizer cib , for a good price,That finally arrived today It is untested and over all in good shape. I did sell my Melody blaster game a year ago. ugh. Is there a way to test it to see it work without the game with it. I am plan on getting it again. when i get more funds. I either had one or the other , but never had them both together. But for now, is there away to test it with other ecs games , or by itself.to see if if the keys work. Any help is apperciated.

+Lathe26 · May 16, 2015

The ECS has a built in way to play the synthesizer. Just plug in a non-ECS game (ex: Astrosmash) and select the right option at boot-up. There is only 3 choices and it will be fairly obvious (I forget the exact text).

jaybird3rd · May 16, 2015

Turn on the Intellivision with the ECS attached, and at the main menu, choose the "MUSIC" option. It's an extremely simple music player that doesn't offer very many features, but it's useful for testing every key of the Music Synthesizer. You can also use it to adjust the ECS volume to match the console's volume: if you play six notes simultaneously, three of them will be played by the console and the other three by the ECS's PSG. Just hold all six notes and adjust the ECS volume control until you don't hear any discrepancy in the volume. Joe Zbiciak offers a dedicated tool for this purpose which is more user-friendly, but to use it on the Intellivision you'd probably need a multicart.

Good luck in your search for Melody Blaster! Before I got my Cuttle Cart 3, I also kept my eyes open for Melody Blaster, but the only copies I could find were the greatly overpriced ones on eBay, which were almost as expensive at the time as the CC3 itself. Reasonably-priced copies do turn up sometimes, but as the saying goes, they're as elusive as Robert Denby.

atari5200dude82 · May 16, 2015

Thanks guys for the information. I did test it out using an ecs game. . all the keys worked. Its pretty cool. . maybe soon, i will be on the hunt for melody blaster :mad: