Zaccaria Scorpion

[scr33n]

Awesome job Bela !!! Congratulations !!!

[PaulSwan]

Nice to see it running

[level42]

Erik, games needed dedicated voice synthesizers in those days to keep memory usage to the bare minimum and also not load the pocesssor(s).
Of corse some damn clever speech got done on Atari 8 bit and C64s later..

I just found this about the voice synth:
http://wn.com/Scorpion_arcade_pcb_by_Zaccaria

Site says:
This is a rare arcade game by Zaccaria released in 1982. It runs on an hardware similar to Scramble by Konami , it even uses the Konami pinout! Interesting note is that it uses a Digitalker MM54104 speech synthesizer by National Semiconductor and to my knowledge it's the only arcade game to use this chip.

Be really careful with that voice synth chip Béla !!! I bet they are rare. Must say it has a very clear speech.

[Robinholland]

Erik, games needed dedicated voice synthesizers in those days to keep memory usage to the bare minimum and also not load the pocesssor(s).
Of corse some damn clever speech got done on Atari 8 bit and C64s later..

I just found this about the voice synth:
http://wn.com/Scorpion_arcade_pcb_by_Zaccaria

Site says:
This is a rare arcade game by Zaccaria released in 1982. It runs on an hardware similar to Scramble by Konami , it even uses the Konami pinout! Interesting note is that it uses a Digitalker MM54104 speech synthesizer by National Semiconductor and to my knowledge it's the only arcade game to use this chip.

Be really careful with that voice synth chip Béla !!! I bet they are rare. Must say it has a very clear speech.

I think it is also encrypted with a battery pack

[level42]

Holysh......be careful * 10 !

[Robinholland]

sound chip

[PaulSwan]

Bela, does it play the rest of Ride of the Valkyries if you keep playing without dying?

[Belike]

Thanks for your kind words.
@Etienne:I think that klov pic is not from a 100% original Scorpion, afaik there is also a dedicated bezel for it.Paul?
Seems like I won't be able to take it to EC12, more news soon in the dedicated section.
@André:I don't know too much about this sound chip, do you think if the battery dies the sound will totally go?
Is there any solution to avoid this?
@Robin:I have another project with that Scramble cp, I'm not planning to sell it atm..
@Bruno:I'M really happy that I could bring back those memories with this game, I have the same feelings with some of my favourites in the past few years.
@Paul:Yeah it plays the whole Valkyre from Wagner on later levels.
@Erik:The fire button is too far from the shooting and rocket ones, so it is unplayable with one hand, but I will ask Zita to assist me for a better video.
You really scared me with this voice synth stuff, any advises would be great to avoid later sound collapse.

[level42]

sound chip

Sound chip or voice synth ?

I wonder why they would protect the sound or voice chip so much ?

@Bela: I can hardly believe it is a killer chip like those used later on f.i. Sega boards. They were not very common in those early days. Also, it would be -very- unlikely for a 30 year old battery to still provide power....

BUT (!!!!!) I know nothing about this board and I think Robin worke on them....

Also....if that black cover would be a piracy protection, why is there a screw on it ?? Maybe to tempt them ?

[Belike]

I will take a closer look of these on the spare boards, more news and pics soon.
The sound was totally gone on the 2nd board, made the "finger test" on the sound amp, seems like it is working.

[PaulSwan]

Before freaking out too much, why do we think the protection device has a battery in it and why do we think this is the speech chip? The MAME driver shows protection applied, attached to an 8255, so I'm wondering of the blob is just an 8255 with the protection attached to it, wrapped in epoxy, that was common at the time.
Paul.

[Belike]

Ok, the sound chips are:
The usual Konami AY....

TDA 1010A sound amp

LM348N

Suspected voice synth, all of the datas was erased from the top on all of my 5 sound boards, I guess it was factory made

Comparing with a stock pic:

And seems like Paul was right again, this was under that metal stuff soldered to the board in an epoxy bath

[Belike]

And if you have patience, you can see some gameplay and hear the Valkyre on the second video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMQ7AiP9yv0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ToS8gJJujo

[level42]

Yeah scraping away chip markings is a well known try to delay/mislead pirates.

So it's what I thought, not the voice synth or sound chip protected.
So what is that protection chip ?
But uhm....it's running in MAME right, so they cracked the protection right ?

[PaulSwan]

Yeah, the software equivalent of the protection circuit is coded up in mame so it's cracked. It's trivial protection.