No sound in Ballblazer

[DamienC]

I have a copy of Ballblazer for my 7800, but there's no sound when I try to play it. I already checked the obvious stuff... the volume IS up, mute is off, and all my other 7800 games play correctly with sound. What could be the problem here?

[Albert]

The Ballblazer cartridge uses an additional (POKEY) chip to produce sound, as the native sound capabilities of the 7800 are rather poor. It's possible that the POKEY chip went bad..

 

..Al

[Viso]

Gumby will be so sad . . .

[+Mitch]

I agree with Al, the most likely cause is a bad Pokey chip in the cart.

Do you have another Ballbalzer or a Commando cart that you can try? These are the only two 7800 carts that use the onboard Pokey chip. It's slightly possible that there is something wrong with your console when reading the Pokey data line. But it's probably just the cart.

 

Mitch

http://atari7800.atari.org

[DamienC]

I hope the chip isn't bad. I'll keep an eye out for another Ballblazer, they seem to be fairly common. I'd like to get my hands on a copy of Commando soon, so if I do I'll test it with that cart as well.

[+Mitch]

Yeah, I wouldn't pay more than $5 for a boxed Ballblazer on Ebay. They're pretty common.

 

Mitch

http://atari7800.atari.org

[Viso]

quote

. . . Do you have another Ballbalzer or a Commando cart that you can try? These are the only two 7800 carts that use the onboard Pokey chip. . .  

Does this mean that what appears to be low quality digitized audio from the intro to Jinks is not generated by a sound chip in the cartridge? Ir does it use something other than a Pokey?

[+Mitch]

quote

Does this mean that what appears to be low quality digitized audio from the intro to Jinks is not generated by a sound chip in the cartridge? Ir does it use something other than a Pokey?  

 

No, Jinks has no Pokey or any other sound chip onboard. It uses the standard 7800 sound. The fact that it has 8k of RAM onboard probably helps though.

 

Mitch

http://atari7800.atari.org