Digitized Sound/Speech on the ATARI 2600

[Lord-Chaos]

Hi,

 

how can you play samples on an ATARI 2600 ?

 

On the ATARI 800 XL it´s quite easy to play 4-Bit samples by setting the volume-only bit but I don´t know how it´s done on the VCS.

 

I have the game Open Sesame which has speech of low quality and AFAIK Quadrun also uses digitized speech.

 

I may use some small samples in my game-project , I think maybe 2-Bit resolution because this doesn´t take much memory if it´s possible.

 

Thimo

[Snider-man]

I don't know how useful this info will be, but here goes.

 

Berzerk is a 4K game (right?) For Mike Mika to add those 3 sound clips in Berzerk:VE, he had to bump it up to 16K. The size quadrupled for 3 sentances.

 

I was just stunned when I heard that....

[Eckhard Stolberg]

Playing samples on the VCS works pretty similarily to the 8-bit. There also is an output type that lets you change the 4-bit volume very quickly for generating samples. But on the VCS you are responsible to draw the screen yourself, so that you might have to blank the screen while the samples are playing, because there isn't enough processing time to generate a good display. If you are interested, I posted some example source code for plaing samples on the VCS to the Stella mailing list in early 1997, I think.

 

 

Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg