Does FarSight have access to original audio recordings?

[Dalex]

Hey guys,

I posted this on the Dr. Who Kickstarter thread but thought I'd make a thread here too as I know there are Farsight developers on this forum.

Does FarSight have access to the original audio recordings done by actors for pinball games? For example, see Pfutz's discussion about the Dr. Who pinball here: http://pfutz.us/UnofficialDoctorWhoPinballHistory. (Scroll to the secion called "The Actors".)

It certainly seems that the audio recordings existed in digital form at Bally/Williams at some point (note the references about John Hey converting them to CVSD format) so the question is, do these digital files still exist somewhere, and if so is FarSight allowed to use them?

The digitized sound quality on early Bally/Williams games is quite poor, so imagine how amazing it would be if FarSight could find a way of playing the original audio recordings at a much higher quality. (As an optional feature obviously.)

Anyone able to comment about this?

Cheers,
Alex

 

[heddhunter]

Hey guys,

I posted this on the Dr. Who Kickstarter thread but thought I'd make a thread here too as I know there are Farsight developers on this forum.

Does FarSight have access to the original audio recordings done by actors for pinball games? For example, see Pfutz's discussion about the Dr. Who pinball here: http://pfutz.us/UnofficialDoctorWhoPinballHistory. (Scroll to the secion called "The Actors".)

It certainly seems that the audio recordings existed in digital form at Bally/Williams at some point (note the references about John Hey converting them to CVSD format) so the question is, do these digital files still exist somewhere, and if so is FarSight allowed to use them?

The digitized sound quality on early Bally/Williams games is quite poor, so imagine how amazing it would be if FarSight could find a way of playing the original audio recordings at a much higher quality. (As an optional feature obviously.)

Anyone able to comment about this?

Cheers,
Alex

Even if they did, it seems unlikely they'd use it. Their goal is preserve the tables as authentically as possible, and if that means grainy speech samples, that's what you'll get.

 

[EldarOfSuburbia]

No. It has been confirmed, multiple times, that Farsight record the sounds coming out of the game's speakers, instead of grabbing the sounds from the ROMs (if indeed they can do so).

You could argue that this actually makes the games more authentic, since you're hearing the sounds as they would've sounded coming out of the actual game's speakers.

I don't know about DE/Sega/Stern tables, but I do know that Williams/Bally tables, despite having two speakers, only ever produced mono sound (even if the original recordings were in stereo!) Would be interesting if they could pull the sound from the ROM, if it was recorded in stereo, to actually have it played through stereo speakers.

 

[Dalex]

Thanks for the explanation, and sorry for being out of the loop!

I find it interesting that FarSight prefers to manually record the sound from the game's speakers, given that all the audio information is just sitting in ROM. As a programmer I would be curious to know the technical reasons for doing this versus emulating the sound chips in software. (Any FarSight developers on here able to comment?)

FYI the data encoded in the ROMs is not difficult to convert to wave format. I actually remember playing around with that years ago -- I pulled out lots of cool sounds from the Dr. Who pinball ROMs including ones I never even heard in the game!

Cheers,
Alex

 

[Gord Lacey]

Also, once the sounds are recorded by FarSight, they compress them, a lot, for the actual game.

 

[Byte]

I can only guess, but I am assuming the binary data from the ROM is fed through a sound chip that actually produces the sound (which may be a 'hack' if it wasn't really designed to e.g. the Atari POKEY chip) and through some more circuits before the signal going to the speakers. You might want to tap the analog signal there, or they can have the machine sitting in a sound stage and using high quality microphones. If not you'd have to emulate the entire path the sound goes through in order to get authentic audio.

 

[Dalex]

Also, once the sounds are recorded by FarSight, they compress them, a lot, for the actual game.

True, but they're nowhere near as compressed and distorted as with CVSD coding. One only needs to listen to the difference between early (pre-DCS) games like Dr. Who and White Water, and later (DCS) games like Star Trek TNG and Theatre of Magic, to hear the incredible difference in the sound quality of speech.

So my point in making this thread is basically asking whether there's any hope of getting DCS-quality sound on pre-DCS games. From a purely technical point of view the answer would be yes *if* they happen to have the original pre-CVSD-converted audio files. But whether they could use these sound files legally, and whether it would be worth spending the development effort on this, is of course another matter.

Cheers,
Alex

 

[Dalex]

I can only guess, but I am assuming the binary data from the ROM is fed through a sound chip that actually produces the sound (which may be a 'hack' if it wasn't really designed to e.g. the Atari POKEY chip) and through some more circuits before the signal going to the speakers. You might want to tap the analog signal there, or they can have the machine sitting in a sound stage and using high quality microphones. If not you'd have to emulate the entire path the sound goes through in order to get authentic audio.

Yep, that is definitely true, and that may well be the reason why FarSight manually digitizes the audio. After all, you'd not only have to emulate the CVSD chip, but all the additional processing and analog amplification that comes after it. (Again would be great if someone from FarSight could comment! )

The interesting thing to note is that even if that's the case, it still wouldn't preclude them from using high quality sound files if they had them. In fact if anything it would be far easier -- They would simply substitute the higher quality audio for what they've previously digitized.

Cheers,
Alex

 

[EldarOfSuburbia]

On mobile devices, the way sound is handled makes a lot of sense. They need to keep size to a minimum. Using compressed sound that is played by native libraries is preferable to emulating an entire sound chip (which would be running on top of the ROM emulation).

On consoles and PC? Hey, why not emulate the whole nine yards? I don't see why it couldn't be done. Rip out the sound files in their native format, and chuck them at the emulation. DCS and BSMT2K sound emulation would be awesome, especially for the later DE/Sega tables that blew your socks off (I'm lookin' at you, Jurassic Park). (Actually, maybe it might not be, because I'm wondering if the on-board RealTek sound on my mobo is more capable than an early-90s era video game sound system. Hmm.)

 

[Worf]

On Williams tables, it's mono audio - you have a tweeter and midrange beside the DMD, and a subwoofer on the bottom. Pre-DCS machines are still mono but I think they use two identical speakers. On DE/Sega machines, they used a single speaker on one side of the DMD - the other was just a plain grill. In a noisy arcade, you can't tell, but in a quieter environment, you can hear sound only coming from one side. The knocker is also just a sound played on DE/Sega machines, there is no physical knocker solenoid.

Even though DCS is mono, the use of a high, mid and low range speakers contribute to its immense increase in audio quality.

Audio wise, Williams was the most advanced using DCS providing high-quality sound. Every other machine out there used an FM synth chip for music and crappy 8kHz or so low res digitized samples. The reason for this is the entire audio must exist in a few ROM chips - you only have a few megabytes to store all the music and samples. You can't use CD-quality sound because the ROMs would be used up for a few seconds of audio. So they downsample the audio to get more audio on the chips. Even DCS isn't CD-quality - it's 32kHz audio. Of course, since DCS uses real sampled music, it increases the audio quality significantly using a real orchestra over chintzy FM synthesized audio.

 

[Kolchak357]

Very true Eldar, many of the Data East/Sega pins had great sound.