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Comment by baldfat | Hacker News Reader

I still loved the fact that I was a kid who played in a bowling league and the arcade was always mind blowing. First mind blowing games were Asteroids and Space Invaders for me. Those games were a ton better then the other games. Then Pac Man and Donky Kong took it to a whole new level. It was a magical time and nothing at home could match it. Personally I liked Mrs. Pac-Man more.

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The most amazing thing from that time for me was the first time I heard Defender, let alone saw it. The sound of those Williams games is as memorable as the visuals and gameplay.

Galaga was also a game that turned up the difficulty up to a new level. It was amazing how the older games kept feeling easier and easier to play. I eventually played Defender for over 8 hours on one quarter. I even went home and eat and walked back to the corner store to finish the game. Then I had to spend 30 minutes killing my guys so I could put my name as the high score. The score lasted a whole week :( Then the machine got shipped out the next week.

Agreed. There was definitely a characteristic "Williams sound collection" that was common across many of their video games (Joust, Defender, Robotron 2048, etc.), and pinball machines, too (e.g. Gorgar). You didn't even have to turn around - you knew a Williams game as soon as you heard it. Personal favourite = Joust respawning sound.

Robotron's sound on the actual machine is overwhelming even today. And the amazing color splash between every level is absolutely entrancing/mesmerizing.

Want to know the best part? Nearly all of those signature sounds were generated algorithmically by the processor on the sound board.

The main program would feed some values into a series of feedback loops and shifts to generate the waves before pushing them out the DAC. Game programmers would just play around with various vectors until they found something that sounded interesting.

The whole shebang ran in 2KiB of ROM firmware and 128 bytes of RAM. At 894 kilohertz.

This dude reverse engineered the 6802 code and translated it to C#. Pretty amazing:

http://www.lomont.org/Software/Misc/Robotron/

Next time on our show we'll talk about the magic of palette cycling. Jarvis still uses this on his games to this very day. Kind of his signature now, right?

Sam Dicker was the programmer for the sound on Defender. He went on to work on the sound for the Amiga computer.

My favourite by them was Galaxian. There were a dozen games of that kind, I don't remember the names. But on top of a great gameplay, I would like to remark how good the graphics were. Very low-res by today standards, it's so difficult to express how nice the colours felt at the time.

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