The Voice of Odyssey rides again

This week’s game review is the awesome new Odyssey2 homebrew, Mr. Roboto! (with many, many thanks to Jarett at Packrat for the “review copy” of the cart – seriously, I just started out asking him for a couple of JPEGs of the thing running on an emulator!). The first video piece I did – thanks in no small part to the AmpSwap (described in a pair of previous entries) – had no sound. Au contraire – this game has sound out the wazoo, from both the console itself and, if you’ve got one plugged in, the add-on Voice of Odyssey speech synthesizer module. Once I did some more work with the amp situation, I decided to have another go at it , and thought I’d see if I could record the Voice, which has its own speaker and doesn’t transmit its audio through the RF modulator, as with the console sound. Basically, this means you have to stick a microphone on the Voice and mix that in with the game sound.
Only one problem: I can’t seem to find my microphone anywhere. But here’s how I stubbornly proceeded to record it anyway.

Once again, the old camcorder comes out of its storage bag and is set up right next to the Odyssey. (Note the brand of the camcorder. Somehow insanely appropriate.) Note the “A/V out” module hooked up to the back, and the red audio cable.

This conveniently puts the camcorder’s microphone right on top of the Voice’s speaker. (The bad part is that the camcorder’s microphone is just inches ahead of the camcorder’s own tape comparment. I had to keep myself from laughing – because it would be recorded – because the sound generated by starting the tape rolling sounded like a cross between the pod doors from the remake of The Fly and a plane taking off!)

That red audio cable runs to one of the two microphone jacks on the mixer that my consoles’ sound runs through. I crank up the game sound so that it’s roughly equal to the Voice (as it turned out on the tape, it was a bit louder actually), and set my digital camcorder recording. (The barreled red, white and yellow cables are carrying the output of the mixer and the video of the game console to the newer camcorder.) All analog, baby!
The result? A re”sound”ing success (after an initial ear-splitting blast of feedback – sorry, Othello and Xena). If there’s a single drawback, it’s the fact that the microphone also caught lots of “joystick” sound – Odyssey joysticks can be less than quiet during an intense game. But while the sound engineer in me cringes at the excess background noise, the gaming purist in me likes it – it’s not excessive, and makes it quite clear, if the decidedly analog method of recording the game didn’t already make it abundantly clear, that this is the real deal, and not emulation, which is pretty important to me.
I was pleased enough with the results that I made a morning of it and recorded fresh video segments for all of the Voice of Odyssey games (though I realized, after breaking down this Rube Goldberg setup, that I had forgotten to record Type & Tell). I had been wondering how I was going to capture the Voice games in all of their glory – now, I suppose, we know. You’ll be able to see the new Voice-enhanced video segments on the site soon, thanks to what I thought was a pretty cool bit of improvisation-from-available-items. Call me the MacGyver of A/V.