Bally World Cup Soccer 1994 – Pinsound

This is the last part 4 or my World Cup Soccer restoration. In this post I will install a Pinsound Plus soundboard as well as their speaker kit. The World Cup 1994 was special for me. I as 19 years old and spent this summer in Greece. I watched the Sweden – Brazil game in a bar at Ios. In the end Sweden got a bronze medal. Truly amazing. The bronze math ended up with penalties and our goalkeeper Thomas Ravelli became the match hero. And still is. He happens to live next to me but I will get back to this later. The main song during this championship here in Sweden is “När vi gräver guld i USA”. This is the main theme I will use.

Order and installation

Pinsound is made in France. I had some correspondence with them before my order and they replied fast and could answer all my questions. The shipment were excellent and very fast. The first impression is that this is a quality product.

The installation was very simple to. I won´t go into any details here as the instructions on their site is perfect. I also installed the speaker set as well as the Pinsound pro card.

Software and digital remastering

I started by adding an extension cable for the USB. This will makes thing easier when testing

First steps

The first thing you want to do is to download the theme for your pinball. Put the full zipped file on your USB and start the pinball. This will take time. Up to 30 minutes when the audio is unpacked. When done test. The USB drive must be present in the Pinsound usb port all the time. You can remove it but when changing anything you should add a zipped file again.

So it works. The file structure of the zipped file is something like this.

jingle
music – 0483787428-restart_multiballsfx
voice

So in the music folder you will have a name like above. The names might seem very logical but they are not. The music is perfectly made for the game and sometime you can not really hear when it is changing. So my tip is to do this. Record some wav or ogg samples with the same name as the folders. Replace the original files, zip and insert the usb. Now play some games and figure out when your sound is played. You will understand that the file names does not really correspond to the gameplay.

It will be quite annoying to hear your own voice. I would recommend to use any of the AI generators below. Just copy and paste the filename, generate a sound and download. Very easy.

AI Voice

There many AI voice generators out there. The last years they have become almost perfect. You will have to pay for some. So why would you like to use them?

Your old Pinball music/sounds are mono.
Your old pinball sound quality is low. With pinsound you have the option of using high quality recordings.
A great way of doing a test
Yo do not want to rerecord the voices by yourself. And a processional recorder is very expensive.

I have tested the ones below.

https://uberduck.ai/
https://murf.ai/
https://replicastudios.com/

Murf is possible the best one as you may modify the emphasis, speed and add pauses. In WCS there are voices for goal. next match, welcome to Dallas and so on. Most of them were recorded by Timothy Kitzrow. I was actually in contact with to see if had the original recordings. But no luck. So using Murf might be an option.

Replica studios gives you some hours of free download. It is more focused towards games. Many voices are known as the voices you will find in RPG. Like Wizards, Alves and Barbarians. It may not be what you are looking for. However some voices are great so give it a test.

Here are two examples how it may sound.

Audicity

I have used Audicity to improve some samples. Just load the default samples. Press ctrl +a, ctrl +d and make stereo track. Now add some filters and re save the sample in stereo. It will be fake stereo but there are ways of improving it like using the plug-in pseudo stereo. (not included as a default plug-in)

Here are two examples with the original recording and the modified with stereo and psuedofilter. Note that you can use ogg files in Pinsound.

Original

Modified

Boot sound

By adding a boot.wav file in the audio folder in your USB after the conversion and unzipping is done you will replace the original boink sound to your own. This really makes your machine more personal. See video below.

Final thoughts

Pinsound is great. I will take your old pinball into new levels. The quality is great as well as the support. The only drawback I have found so far is that the conversion takes a long time when trying new themes.

My Theme is the World Cup 1994 where Sweden placed third. In the penalty shoot-out the save that gave us bronze was done by my neighbor Thomas Ravelli. He was here some days ago testing it and signing.