Wednesday 22 June 2016

Discs of Tron Arcade Sound Board Testing


Wow! What a busy year making Pinball Hardware. Hardly any time for an update :) There's been loads going on here at myPinballs and lots of projects in the works. Stay tuned.

As a few of you may know i make replacement electronics for pinballs and one of these is the Squawk & Talk sound board for a range of early 80s Bally pinball games. The board is a great piece of technology from the 80s featuring some of the best speech and effects from the time. I redesigned the board a year and a half or so ago to bring some improvements and long term reliability to these classic pinball games along with sourcing all the hard to find ics. It has proved very popular with pinball fans :)  Batch 2 boards can be bought from my store here http://mypinballs.co.uk/electronics/store.jsp or from ebay here.

Yesterday someone contacted me regarding getting this board redesign to work with the Midway game 'Discs of Tron' I will admit that i didn't really know much about this game as i am mainly a pinball guy with a love for the early Nintendo arcade upright cabs and games (as shown on my space firebird thread here :))

So last night i spent a little time studying the schematics and burring a new set of roms to try out in one of my boards. Here are the results :) The boards i'm making can easily be adapted to run in these games i think and i will make some further improvements on the next batch of boards for true plug and play if they are something that would be popular for this game to. 

Enjoy! "Bring in the Logic Probe!" 


The video shows boot up and a boot sound along with the speech and sound tests from the boards hardware. The speech test goes through each speech call in turn. The sound test is at the end of the speech tests and plays 1 effect to confirm operation. The board then reboots. Common problems with original boards are missing and dead speech or sound sections along with poor quality and scratchy sound.

I may post another video later with some of the sound effects playing on my 8ball deluxe pinball to