Home Page Forums MAME MAME apple2 willy byte voice

I got interested in playing some Willy Byte, and was wondering about the voice.





You can hear the first voice phrase at the 3:30 mark of the video, and at the 3:59 mark for the second phrase.

If I do a "wp c440,8,rw" in the debugger, I can see it writing a few values to the SC-01 on the mockingboard.




It's not a big deal, just curious.

As far as I know, it just says "Willy Byte in the Digital Dimension" and "Prepare to enter the digital dimension".

I like the mockingboard sound, the opening screen music and the map screen music reminds me of Wendy Carlos Switched-on Bach.


Anyway, I made a couple of little discoveries, CTRL+D and CTRL+F in the CPU screen will clear the last entry and take it out of PROG mode.


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The Power and Clock minigames from Willy Byte in the Digital Dimension are quite challenging.

The Power minigame is a qbert like game, it's pretty hard but the little electric bolts will always appear from the other half of the screen so they have some predictability. You can also wrap around the screen horizontally, and 8 directional jumping is allowed, but you're also allowed to jump off into space.

The goal of the clock minigame (as far as I can tell) is to climb up to the top of the screen and press the button, which presumably resets the clock.

From the manual:

SPECIAL FEATURES OF THE POWER ROOM
CTRL P (Program) - Allows you to construct your own pattern using hexadecimal code.
Here’s a brief description of how this works:

For each group of 4 power pads, 0 0 0 0, one value is given to denote which of
those pads are present and which are not. In hexadecimal, we count from 0-15.
using the standard decimals 0-9 followed by the six (hex) alpha characters, A-F.

The row of numbers that appears across the top of the screen in Program mode
shows the binary value for each vertical column of pads. Hexadecimal is just a
faster, simpler way to represent binary patterns in two places, with the “1's” place
representing the 8-4-2-1 pattern and the “10's” place representing the 80-40-20-10
pattern. Thus, by using both places together, you are able to control two
congruous patterns of 4 at once, which is actually just one larger pattern of 8. This
pattern of eight “on” or “off” pads symbolizes the same kind of organization as
one byte (eight bits) of information inside the computer.

PRESSING CTRL P AGAIN RETURNS YOU TO GAME PLAY.

NOTE: IT IS POSSIBLE TO CONSTRUCT SITUATIONS WHICH ARE IMPOSSIBLE TO PLAY
THROUGH. IF THIS OCCURS, PRESS CONTROL P AGAIN AND ENTER A MORE FEASIBLE
PATTERN.

CTRL N - Allows you to move forward and backward (using the left and right arrow keys)
to view and play higher (or lower) levels.

(The levels go from 000 to 029 and the level number is shown in the upper right of the screen.)

PRESSING CTRL N AGAIN RETURNS YOU TO GAME PLAY.

TO EXIT POWER ROOM AT WILL: Press CONTROL X
TO LEAVE DEMO: Press the JOYSTICK BUTTON or the SPACE BAR
TO SWITCH TO KEYBOARD CONTROL: Press CONTROL K
TO SWITCH TO JOYSTICK CONTROL: Press CONTROL J
TO RESTART GAME: Press CONTROL R
TO TURN SOUND ON/OFF: Press CONTROL S

Not listed in manual:

On CPU screen, CTRL+D will clear the last program entry. So if you hit a button by mistake, CTRL+D will clear it.

Also on CPU screen CTRL+F makes a musical sound in alternating left and right channels and takes you out of PROG mode.

As per the video you posted, Willy Byte wants the SSI-263 (SC-02), not the SC-01.

That explains it, and the SC-01 and the SC-02 are similar but not compatible.

I was able to find a video that has the mockingboard speech, and Willy will say "Oh wow" "Alright" and "Help".

Hex Luthor will say "Greetings computer nerds". (at the 18:15 mark) I thought this was pretty funny.

"prepare to enter keyboard, ram, power disk drive"
"prepare to enter the digital dimension"
"willy byte in the digital dimension"

(playthrough starts at 10:56)

The AppleWin emulator supports both speech chips, and I verified in Total Replay that the speech works.
I'm intending to add cheats because the game is just too hard.

For a very loose definition of "supports", but yes

I thought I'd fire up Apple Cider Spider for a spin and read somewhere that it supports the mockingboard. I was able to find a manual on archive and you have to type CTRL+B on the title screen where it'll ask you for the mockingboard slot #.

That's why Total Replay is nice - it auto-patches games to enable Mockingboard support if you have one.

Total Replay is one of the greatest things since sliced bread. (next to Mame of course 8-)

You still have to hit CTRL+B for Apple Cider Spider Mockingboard sound. In some ways, I prefer the apple speaker sound effects of Apple Cider Spider.





Total Replay/Battle Cruiser hangs on launch if mockingboard present. Battle Cruiser runs fine without mockingboard.

I think Battle Cruiser was also known as Night Flight.



0860 sta $f9
0862 jsr $b000
0865 lda $ff
0867 bne $0865 << hangs up here
0869 jmp $8d70
086C lda #$02


MAME debugger version 0.240 (mame0240-126-g38c1791d77
Currently targeting apple2e (Apple //e)
>g
>b@ff=0

Once it hangs up, if you set memory location FF to zero, it will be able to go in game, but it seems like a lot of the sounds are missing.


Interestingly, if you try to run Night Flight, it seems to run just fine, with more sound effects.




I was trying to decipher how the mockingboard works and it's made a bit more complicated by the fact that there's a bunch of different versions.

Apple Cider Spider should play through the Mockinbgoard without Ctrl-B. It definitely does in the current builds. Maybe I fixed something since v4.
Battle Cruiser requires a speech chip, the same as Rescue Raiders. The TR version of both will disable the Mockingboard if the speech chip isn't found.
If your version hangs then I must have fixed it in the meantime. I just checked the latest build and both run as expected.

Night Flight is the game that became Battle Cruiser after adding Mockingboard support, and maybe some other features.