Sound Effects

In 1978, Texas Instruments had just released a sound-effects chip that could be programmed to generate a variety of sound effects. Of course, the programming was done primarily by wiring capacitors and resistors of certain values onto certain pins. It was clumsy but good enough for my needs. I purchased one and built a board for it, setting up a trigger line from my KIM-1. Then I added some software to the program to trigger the sound chip whenever a tank fired its gun. I fed the chip's output into a small speaker and, by golly gee, it really worked! Whenever a tank fired, a nice throaty explosion sounded on the speaker.

I decided to surprise my friend and playtester Mike, so I fed the output of the sound chip directly into my stereo ...

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