Jinks question...

[ApolloBoy]

What's up with the digitized speech and music in the title screen? Is there a POKEY chip in the game, or is the 7800 capable of doing digitized sound by itself?

[+Mitch]

Nope, there isn't a Pokey in there. Pure 7800 (eh, 2600) sound.

 

Mitch

[DracIsBack]

With the right programming, just about anything can do digitized speech. They even pulled off digitized voices in the original IBM PC internal speaker. Barbarian and Mean Streets come to mind!

 

Although I'm not a big fan of JINKS, I thought Peter Pachla deserved kudos for pulling off the digitized speech and sound. Wish he'd been there to add the screams to 7800 CROSSBOW and Elvin's taunts to IMPOSSIBLE MISSION.

[Lauren Tyler]

Not to mention the scream your character makes when he falls off the screen!

[Room 34]

With the right programming, just about anything can do digitized speech. They even pulled off digitized voices in the original IBM PC internal speaker. Barbarian and Mean Streets come to mind!

And the original Castle Wolfenstein and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein! Those freaked me out the first time I played them... I had no idea my computer could do that!

[MegaManFan]

My Beyond Castle Wolfenstein for C-64 never worked. I even returned it because I thought it was defective and got another one, and it still wouldn't load. Of course this made me suspect my drive was out of alignment, but then all the other disks I had at the time loaded fine. I've still never gotten to play it.

[Room 34]

I haven't played the C64 version but the PC version was lots of fun! I actually had Beyond before I had the original, and both of them saw lots of action on my old Tandy 1000 EX. I am guessing that the C64 versions would have been basically the same but with better graphics (or at least more colors).

 

Those games were from the era of high-quality PC game distribution... I remember the instructions were single sheet reduced photocopies of 4- or 8-page originals. (Actually, I think they were copies of copies...)

 

And of course, the labels on the disks were printed on a dot-matrix printer!

[ApolloBoy]

Nope, there isn't a Pokey in there. Pure 7800 (eh, 2600) sound.

 

Mitch

 

[Video]

Woah, I thought that had to be a Pokey or something. I know Anything can do digitized voice, but most 7800 stuff is rather lacking, unless it does have a pokey.

[tyranthraxus]

Woah, I thought that had to be a Pokey or something.  I know Anything can do digitized voice, but most 7800 stuff is rather lacking, unless it does have a pokey.

 

There must have been something seriously wrong at Atari in the sound

department. There are many many fine sounding games on the 2600. But

the 7800 regularly coughs up ear bleeding sound. But perhaps part of

that could be because 7800 era games we expected background music

instead of just a few beeps and blips.

 

John

[DracIsBack]

Woah, I thought that had to be a Pokey or something.  I know Anything can do digitized voice, but most 7800 stuff is rather lacking, unless it does have a pokey.

 

Cheap Tramiel development budgets.

 

Honestly, though - there are some 7800 titles I find that have "decent" (for a 7800) sound that doesn't produce ear-bleeding. Wish more of the games were like MIDNIGHT MUTANTS et al.