Re: Battlezone marque

From: Andy Welburn <warlords_at_ntlworld.com>
Date: Wed Aug 07 2002 - 04:47:10 EDT

> Early Battlezones allowed you to adjust the "RPM" of the tank's
> engine by turning a small knob on the Aux board. Later BZs
> replaced this knob with a fixed resistor. I'm sure operators
> didn't bother adjusting it properly and left it as-is; that's
> probably why you remember the older games sounding "wrong."
>
> I'm surprised Atari left what is clearly a game design decision
> for the operators to mess with.

I dunno if this makes sense, but i would imagine that the adjustable pitch
of the engine rumble noise was actually quite handy in certain locations..

Depending on where you site the machine, the rumble has a sonic boom effect
in certain areas of the room, not noticeable byt the player of the machine,
but if you are passing by, you can enter areas of amplified booming because
of the various soundwaves bouncing off, and in some areas cancelling each
other out, in other areas booming.. if you could increase the pitch, and
therefore the size of the soundwaves you could eliminate the booming in
certian areas..

also, you could increase the overall volume of the game without the cabinet
shaking itself to pieces due to low frequency noises :)

sounds silly i know, but at least one operator told me of the
sonic-booming-in-a-room theory

Andy

PS- I have far too many battlezone boardsets to fix :|

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Received on Wed Aug 7 01:52:43 2002

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