Defender Sound Studio

(zapspace.net)

23 points | by lapnect a day ago ago

6 comments

  • michaelhoney 10 minutes ago

    I'm thrilled that this exists. Defender had the most badass sounds and fast gameplay, it transcended the limitations of the its era.

  • JKCalhoun 4 hours ago

    Literally (yes, using the word correctly here) just wondered today(!) how the sounds for Defender were created.

    I have a sound board from an original Williams Defender (maybe the same used in Stargate, Joust?). I have a power supply to run it, a mechanical rotary switch to select the sound you want and a mechanical button to trigger it. I have been meaning to make a nice enclosure for it ... make a cool coffee table ornament.

    Always loved those sounds. A friend made a 1-bit synthesizer and you could dial in sounds that occasionally suggested Defender. I assumed therefore the sounds were mathematically generated somehow.

    I had tracked down the assembly for the board (probably used by MAME) but had not spent the time to reverse engineer the audio magic. Apparently someone has however.

    Very cool. Mind blowing sounds when this game showed up at a nearby arcade — and its sill got it.

    That "Game Start" sound is still so stunning. Just playing a bit with it, it looks like "echo" was the killer ingredient.

    • Samsay 26 minutes ago

      The first word is used in a wrong context, makes no sense here . It is an extraordinary good example of wrong use of the word. There is no metaphor in that sentence that could be a meaningful reference for that first word.

  • nyanpasu64 2 hours ago

    Is "decay" subtracting the waveform's original shape (right-shifted to drop its lowest 2-ish bits) from itself, plus arithmetic overflow?

  • mdswanson 3 hours ago

    One of my all-time favorites, and wow, this brought back some fantastic memories! What great sounds!