Sound Effects

In 1978, Texas Instruments had just released a sound-effects chip that could be programmed to generate a variety of sound effects. Of course, the programming was done primarily by wiring capacitors and resistors of certain values onto certain pins. It was clumsy but good enough for my needs. I purchased one and built a board for it, setting up a trigger line from my KIM-1. Then I added some software to the program to trigger the sound chip whenever a tank fired its gun. I fed the chip's output into a small speaker and, by golly gee, it really worked! Whenever a tank fired, a nice throaty explosion sounded on the speaker.

I decided to surprise my friend and playtester Mike, so I fed the output of the sound chip directly into my stereo system, which faced the table on which the KIM-1 sat. I invited Mike over to play a few rounds with a "new improvement" I had made on the software. We sat down, the game began, and we both started frantically maneuvering our tanks, searching for each other. The surprise, it turned out, was on both of us, because Mike saw my tanks first. He entered a fire command before I even suspected that we had made contact. Unfortunately, I had miscalculated the impedance matching of the chip to the stereo, and so the resulting explosion was enough to knock us both out of our chairs. As we staggered to our feet, I asked, "What do you think of the new sound effects?"



Chris Crawford on Game Design
Chris Crawford on Game Design
ISBN: 0131460994
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 248

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