Agreed. There was definitely a characteristic "Williams sound collection" that was common across many of their video games (Joust, Defender, Robotron 2048, etc.), and pinball machines, too (e.g. Gorgar). You didn't even have to turn around - you knew a Williams game as soon as you heard it. Personal favourite = Joust respawning sound.
Robotron's sound on the actual machine is overwhelming even today. And the amazing color splash between every level is absolutely entrancing/mesmerizing.
Want to know the best part? Nearly all of those signature sounds were generated algorithmically by the processor on the sound board.
The main program would feed some values into a series of feedback loops and shifts to generate the waves before pushing them out the DAC. Game programmers would just play around with various vectors until they found something that sounded interesting.
The whole shebang ran in 2KiB of ROM firmware and 128 bytes of RAM. At 894 kilohertz.
This dude reverse engineered the 6802 code and translated it to C#. Pretty amazing:
Next time on our show we'll talk about the magic of palette cycling. Jarvis still uses this on his games to this very day. Kind of his signature now, right?
