Tuesday 5 July 2016

More Arcade Speech Board Testing - Midway NFL Football

After the success of the Discs of Tron Speech board tests, i thought i'd investigate whether other arcade games from the same era and hardware used the Squawk & Talk Board in their design. It seems that the Midway MCR Hardware had a fairly flexible I/O board which allowed sound generation on board but also other hardware tech to be plugged in for a variety of purposes. A great idea for a hardware board design as it gives the developers and programmers lots of options for adding in cool features and effects.


So after searching for awhile on a few websites i found that Midway's NLF Football arcade game also uses the S&T board. I loated a set of rom images, burned a new set of roms and installed them into my test board in my Bally Eight Ball Deluxe Pinball. Here's a video of the results.


"Get Your Ice Cold Beer" Awesome! On power up the board booted up flashing the self test led 4 times. For arcade games the on board AY-8912 sound generator ic isn't used, though the DAC is still required. Pressing the self test button started the speech test sequence heard on the video and the board went through all its speech phrases and then rebooted as normal once completed.

Great to know that my new board redesign can be used in 2 Midway arcade games now.

I also read that the board was going to be used in Midway's Tapper for 'belch' speech, but wasn't included in the end by the developers. A shame, as that would have been cool to try out and produce. I wonder if there are any Tapper versions out there with speech?  Early versions or prototypes maybe? Let me know if you have info :)