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http://www.gooddealgames.com/interviews/int_David%20Thiel.html http://www.gooddealgames.com/interviews/int_David%20Thiel.ht... has a better description of Q*Ber
by drfuchs 4y ago
http://www.gooddealgames.com/interviews/int_David%20Thiel.html http://www.gooddealgames.com/interviews/int_David%20Thiel.ht... has a better description of Q*Bert's cussing than minute 35 of the video:
MT: You came up with the idea of using the random phonemes of a speech chip to make Q*Bert speak gibberish. How and why did you arrive at the idea and decision?
David Thiel: Out of frustration. Reactor was my first audio task for Gottlieb. Management insisted that I use the Votrax [phoneme generating chip]. For development there wasn't anything more than a list of Votrax phonemes, a dictionary and assembly code. I spend two days trying to get the Votrax to say "10000 Bonus Points". I would try it out on people as they walked through the lab. After hearing it they would say "What are Bogus Points"? Chris Brewer who was providing tech support for me made the offhand remark about feeding the Votrax random phonemes. I programmed a test and I loved the results. Within that week I saw the Q*Bert character hopping around and I told Warren, "Boy, have I got something for you".
MT: Many players still swear that they occasionally hear Q*Bert say naughty things. Can you finally put to rest the rumor that Q*Bert states nothing specific other than "Hello, I'm turned on" when the coin-op is powered up and "Bye-bye" at the end of a game?
DT: Hello and Bye-bye are the only deterministic phonemes fed to the Votrax in Q*Bert, other than the "ahhhhhhhhh" when Q*Bert goes off the pyramid. There was a Q*Bert in the cafeteria which talked during the attract mode. One day I am sure that I heard it say "Radio Shack". For the record: no profanity is programmed into phoneme stream in the Q*Bert sound program.
- leereeves 4y agoVery interesting. Now I want to listen to Q*bert and see what the random phonemes come up with. Uniformly random phonemes would occasionally "say naughty things". But "Radio Shack"? That's 8 phonemes, and rather unlikely (1 in 44^8 if the chip supported all 44 English phonemes).
- detritus 4y agoSurely it would be that unlikely if the machine was located in a Radio Shack, otherwise it has entire dictionary and encyclopedias worth of phoneme jumbles to potentially arrive at?
- leereeves 4y agoTrue, there are a lot of meaningful 8 phoneme phrases. Maybe a million? Then the odds of hitting any of them would be about (10^6)/(44^8) or about one in fourteen million. But close matches like "Rahdio Shack", "Radio Shahck", "Adio Shack", etc for all those phrases might occur more often than one in a million.
- joezydeco 4y agoAll you need to hear is ay + oh + ack in that order, not necessarily together, and your brain will probably do the rest. We've spent decades explaining this to people that hear messages in records when played backwards and it still needs repeating.
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y agoMy iPhone acts like I said “hey Siri” sometimes when I just said something else with “ey” followed by “ee”. That's a machine of course, but I don't think humans are much better.
- thewebcount 4y agoYou don't even need to play them backwards! "Excuse me while I kiss this guy!"
- gregmac 4y agoHe talks a bit about the psuedo-random generator [1] they used, including showing some code, but doesn't mention how the seed is set. Given this is an 8088 and in 1982, I guess there isn't a RTC and they wouldn't use persistent storage for that, so the seed is going to be taken based on startup ticks or something like that -- does anyone know? If you were to plug in the cabinet and record it, is it going to make the identical sounds every time? (and if not, why not? that implies some external source of randomness) [1] https://youtu.be/FhkLfz0GKYU?t=1607 https://youtu.be/FhkLfz0GKYU?t=1607
- drfuchs 4y agoWell, the Q*bert Instruction Manual, top of page numbered "17", shows Vbattery powering two "Scratch Pad Memory" RAM chips. This is typically where the "High Scores" are stored in anticipation of your local arcade shutting down for the night; and who knows, maybe the random number seed / state is in there, too. http://pdf.textfiles.com/manuals/ARCADE/K-R/Q-Bert%20(Scan%202)%20[Instructions]%20[English].pdf http://pdf.textfiles.com/manuals/ARCADE/K-R/Q-Bert%20(Scan%2...
- koz1000 4y agoA lot of games I worked on kept a running counter in RAM and then seeded the PRNG when a coin was inserted. That was random enough.