Sound

Because I was using DOS, it meant that I had to have a sound card that could run in DOS. So there was only really one logical solution. An original ISA SoundBlaster. Luckily I picked up an AWE64 Value off ebay for about 10 quid and it came with a driver CD. That was a godsend, because it is so hard to get the right drivers off the net for these old cards. I had one of these cards before and it just refused to work for me with any of the drivers I tried.

Luckily my motherboard was old enough to still have ISA slots, most of the new ones have done away with them now, so I just popped it in and got on with installing the drivers, which was dead easy seeing I had the CD.

I set up ArcadeOS to use the SoundBlaster, once all the DOS drivers initialized properly, and set the sample rate to 22khz as arcade games don't have CD quality sound so anything higher would have been wasted and probably have made it run slower anyway.

So after setting up the software side of things, I checked it was working by plugging in my headphones and then got to work on the speakers that were going into the cabinet. These used to be my old computer speakers and they had an inbuilt amp with its own transformer rather than the blocky things that take up 2 power plugs. But first I had to get them out of the plastic shells they were in. This was quite simple; just unscrew the casing and the screws that were holding them in. But the wire was still looped through the hole in the casing, and I didn't want to cut it, or have to unsolder it and then re-solder it back on. So I did what anyone would have done and bashed the crap out of it with a claw hammer. This took a few heavy, well placed blows, but it did crack the casing eventually, sending a satisfying spray of plastic all over the room. This let me remove the wire from the casing and then mount the speakers to a board I made from left over MDF using some hot melt glue. I mounted the amp just behind as shown in the photo.

I thought about drilling holes in the marquee to let more sound through, but it sounded pretty good like it was, so I left it alone. I also though about mounting the amp module just behind the marquee so that the volume and power knobs could stick through, so I could turn it off or change the volume, but it was a bit too tricky, and I thought it might ruin the look of the marquee and a traditional cabinet.

The speakers power cable was slightly too short to reach the main power board at the bottom of the cabinet, so I plugged it in to the board that I had mounted to the side for this specific purpose.

And so the sound was working. Time to move on to something else.