Why/How was Bally so ahead in Voice/Sound/Music 79-82?

[MegaDrive (Mark Wyda)]

Seriously. Centaur sounds clearer, and has more voice samples than dare I say many System 11/Alpha Numeric Games that came much later. It's so damn impressive to me, especially when you put it right next to Black Knight, Black Hole which basically sound like Speak and Spell by comparison.

I mean Xenon released around the exact same time as Gorgar, one has broken, male words taped together, and a simple (but awesome) slow/fast heartbeat, the other has fluid, clear female sentences which take up more memory as is, due to the female voice having a higher octave (IIRC) and full music (which also speeds up and slows down... miss that in pins actually...) and even the sound effects in Xenon were (forget her name's) voice sped up/altered to make an effect.

By the way, if you haven't seen the making of Xenon documentary do so.

 

[jaredmorgs]

Regarding "How":

Centaur and Xenon uses a MPU featuring extra sound components (AS-2518-61B Sound chip with an -81 (Reverb) chip and a Say-it-again board). This allowed for more EPROM slots, therefore more speech.

As to your question about "why", I seem to remember that Bally Williams didn't merge until 1981, so the two companies developed different MPUs and as such used different technologies. These technologies were unified when the companies merged.