One of the classic Bally pinball machines of the early 80's was a machine called Centaur. It's main mechanical features are a five ball multiball system and an underfield coil that can grab and hold the ball on the playfield momentarily. It was from the era when pinball went from being electromechanical to electronic, complete with all the electrical smoke that involved. In the early days the machines had their own personality and the early Texas Instruments speech chips were used to give a thunderously bassy speech helped greatly by the fact that pinball cabinets are basically big subwoofers. If you noticed the tinny rattling noise during the speech, that was the coin eject flap rattling on the front of the machine.
Centaur was unique in having an early reverb chip called SAD4096 made by Reticon intended for applications like guitar effects. It was used to add a reverb/echo to the speech at a time when traditional echo machines used a continuous magnetic tape loop passing over multiple heads. It worked well at the time, but the SAD 4096 chips tended to degrade with age and there are very few machines with the original reverb chips still working in them.
When I got my Centaur machine it inevitably had a defective reverb card that had been bypassed. Since I liked the boomy echo I decided to design a replacement and since it raised a lot of interest I put the project with component list and PCB track image on my website here:-
www.bigclive.com/centaur.htm
Note that the images look tiny now due to our modern high resolution screens and the serious restrictions on file sizes when that page was put up during the dial-up Internet era. Most images from that time were 320 by 240 because larger files meant that pages would take several minutes to load. (The Internet is still young.)
There's no actual PCB file available as the original was in a format used by an old DOS CAD package called Boardmaker 1.
Although the ICs I used went obsolete around the time I released the design, China has come to the rescue with eBay listings for NOS (New Old Stock) components.
If you can get the two main chips and have PCB etching facilities then you can make one of these cards for your own machine, or alternatively you can buy commercial versions of the board from various online sellers. I made the design openly available to the pinball community, so the commercial units are being sold with my full approval. I don't actually manufacture and sell these myself.
Here's an online seller who stocks a version:-
www.marcospecialties.com/pinball-parts/AS-2518-81
If you enjoy these videos you can help support the channel with a dollar for coffee, cookies and random gadgets for disassembly at:-
www.bigclive.com/coffee.htm
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Негізгі бет Ғылым және технология Designing the Centaur pinball replacement echo card.
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