What's the Purpose of Controller II's Microphone?

Started by Nintega, July 10, 2007, 02:33:51 pm

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Nintega


kite200

certain games use it. in kid icarus you can yell into the mic while in the shop to make the guy lower prices.

it's also fun to hear your voice through the tv.


Are you a goemon fan btw?
ステキ

djdac

you can also use it to talk sh*t when ur playing a game against someone  :D

JC

Unfortunately, too few games used the mic.

Atlantis no Nazo
Takeshi no Chousenjou
Hikari Shinwa: Palutena no Kagami

At least those are the ones I've heard about.

vealchop

"Raid on Bungeling Bay" used it. Players were urged to yell "NAMCO" when playing against an opponent to generate more attack helicopters.

Also "Legend of Zelda" used it as well. Remember even in the american version you would find an old man that said the pols voice hates noise. Most would say he meant the magic flute, but supposedly you could yell into the mic on controller 2 to get the same effect against them.
-chop

133MHz

Sorry for shamelessly plugging into your question, but does anybody know the technical aspects about the Famicom microphone? How does the Famicom 'hear' ? Never used one, but if today with very powerful computers and complicated software speech recognition isn't anywhere near perfect, an 8 bit 1.79MHz console which could only address 64KB of storage directly released in the 80s is waaaay off it.

Maybe it just detects the sound level? So the Famicom doesn't care what you are actually saying/singing, just if any sound is loud enough to trigger it. Or maybe it is something a little bit more complicated like a bandpass filter calibrated at about 1kHz rigged to something like an 8 bit ADC connected to some CPU register so it can detect some simple sounds?

Of course, I'm talking out of my ass here since I've never seen in person (let alone used or owned) a Famicom in my entire life, so those are just hypotheses on how it may work. It would be really cool if someone could shine some light into the subject ;D

Jedi Master Baiter

Quote from: vealchop on July 10, 2007, 07:11:36 pm
Also "Legend of Zelda" used it as well. Remember even in the american version you would find an old man that said the pols voice hates noise. Most would say he meant the magic flute, but supposedly you could yell into the mic on controller 2 to get the same effect against them.

I think the recorder (flute) does nothing.

madman

It's a simple level detector, it obviously doesn't do voice recognition of any sort.  The results of the input are written to a single bit in a register.

manuel

Quote from: vealchop on July 10, 2007, 07:11:36 pm
Also "Legend of Zelda" used it as well. Remember even in the american version you would find an old man that said the pols voice hates noise. Most would say he meant the magic flute, but supposedly you could yell into the mic on controller 2 to get the same effect against them.


Voice is used in Phantom Hourglass, too. The last day I encountered an enemy I had to yell at to defeat it.  ;D Nice idea, unless you're not on a train or something. ;)

satoshi_matrix

The Famicom Mic was used in too few games and in every case the effects of whatever use it served could've been obtained in another way, so I'm kind of jaded you dont have the Start and Select buttons on the second controller for two player second player pausing-for-no-reason shinanagins. That's one reason I prefer the AV Famicom to the original.

Nintega

Quote from: kite200 on July 10, 2007, 02:56:03 pm
certain games use it. in kid icarus you can yell into the mic while in the shop to make the guy lower prices.

it's also fun to hear your voice through the tv.


Are you a goemon fan btw?


Very cool. Shows that the system was way ahead of its time.

And yes I love Goemon. I only have Goemon 1 Famicom and  Mystical Ninja SNES though.

kite200

pick up the 2 n64 games, and the ds one. those are my favs
ステキ

JC


satoshi_matrix

the disk version anyway. I dont have the cartridge re-release. I'd be interested in knowing if the cart has it too or if it was esstintally a Japanese version of the NES game.

FamicomFreak

man that's awesome I'm going to try it with some of those games now.
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