Jim Weisz recounts his development for the Gottlieb sound hardware.

"I designed the Q*Bert sound board, though Q*Bert wasn't the first game it was used in. The "Weisz" design sound board was first used in the pinball game "Pink Panther" - although I don't remember it talking. The horror story about that one was the EPROMs I used for development behaved differently than the ones purchased for production, which had caused me to omit the +5V connection for Vpp, which caused the new EPROMs to randomly not work.

I remember doing all my original design/programming work on the sound board on the Rockwell ICE system (what a horrid machine!) while Craig [Beierwaltes] was programming the old board (also 6502 based) on a KIM.

The first talking one I remember was "Mars: God of War". That one is particularly memorable since the folks in France insisted that it speak French. I spent quite a while trying to make the SC-01 make sounds that were vaguely understandable as French. Hell, it doesn't even speak English very well! I used a table of definitions which equated the phoneme 'names' to the data bytes so I could write 'speeches' in lines of db statements (or whatever the 6502 equivalent is). I think I also wrote a quickie program for the Rockwell ICE that took a string of those phoneme names on the command line and output them to the chip.

Upping the clock rate moves the pitch up, and speeds up overall timing. There are also two inputs for selecting 4 different pitches (w/o changing timing, presumably). The clock can be an RC, and they show a pot allowing for adjustable pitch."

The 30 volts [on the sound board] was needed for the National Semiconductor amp (which became unavailable during the Q*Bert run).

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