Description
The Ni-Wumpf GTB sound board was designed to provide a replacement for several of the early Gottlieb sound boards, from the tone cards that saw production with Solar Ride right out to the System 80B sound card for Tag Team. There are 35 different games that use these boards. These includes the 555 tone board, the first generation sound board, the MA-55 board, and the MA-490 – basically all sound boards that used a 6503 and the 6530 MIOT chip. With three connectors on the board, it can connect with the System 1 games, both tone card connection at the bottom, and the normal connector on the left, while the right connector is for the System 80 games.
Like the new System 80 CPU, this board uses the original Gottlieb firmware in reproducing the sound board functionality in all aspects; it provides a DIP switch to enable the attract mode, and another to select the sound/tone versions of the original sounds. And also like that board, the code must be licensed on the separate microSD card.
It does not reproduce the simple tones of the tone card though, so if you want 555 tones, spend the $50 on a tone card on eBay, but if you want a rich sound theme for these games, you’re looking in the right direction.
Sound themes are being developed for many of the System 1 games (though not so easily for the System 80 games), and they involve signaling the sound board to play a specific sound for a specific switch – like modern pinball games do. This is achieved by a signaling protocol between the Ni-Wumpf CPU and the sound board. Themes cannot be supported with any other System 1 CPU, and the revision level on the Ni-Wumpf CPU must be 2.70 or above (there is no charge to upgrade Ni-Wumpf CPUs to the latest revision of software if they are sent in – just the return shipping). In this protocol, each switch has 9 possible sounds, one each for the point scoring of the switch (remember pop-bumpers score 100 or 1000 points in many cases), and three entries for that scoring sound selected randomly. i.e. rebound rubbers, scoring 10 points can respond with three sounds now, randomly selected.
