Originally published at: Why haven't toy laser gun sounds changed in 30+ years? | Boing Boing
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Sooner or later we will reach the point where it becomes cheaper to make the pew pew noises in toy guns by repurposing a mass produced chip with enough processing power to run Doom, than it is to manufacture the HK628 chip specifically for the purpose. We’re already there with cheap desk calculators, plastic laser guns that can run doom can’t be far behind.
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That’s interesting. The product listing is here, and includes an mp3 of the sounds. When I played it, my partner, having no context, remarked, “Oh! That takes me back to when I was 10 years old!”
Anyway, here’s the “laser” gun I played with as a kid. Now get off my lawn.
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maybe they haven’t changed because they were perfected.
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Most of the old Star Wars toys from the 70s/80s apparently came out before they were able to easily reproduce electronic sound samples. They had a little motor in them that would whirrr at a high pitch (like an electric drill) and that was supposed to be the laser sound. Ha. (The reissues of the same toys in the 90s replaced that with actual electronic movie sound effects)
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I’ve heard car burglar alarms that cycle through a bunch of different sirens, similar to the Honsitek HK620.
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Car alarms probably use the same chip with a different mask ROM code. After all, they have the same characteristics of playing the same eight sound effects in sequence that hasn’t changed since the eighties.
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Hearing the sounds made me think of these ghostbusters sound effects toys that I think I got at Hardee’s. Found a vid on YouTube: Ghostbusters II Hardee's proton pack noisemakers - YouTube
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Using any of those chips, even the 556 is overkill. You could replace them with a couple 555s.
Oh, wait… 
The thing about using a dual 555 to generate the sounds is that you’d need to switch resistors and capacitors, some wiring, for each sound effect.
That’d be fine for an outrageously expensive SFX box for the car, but to chop the costs, a playback chip would be the answer. They probably just recorded the output of one of the 555 boxes, and there you go.
The source of the sound effects? Magazines like Popular Electronics were full of 555 projects during the 70s. Someone probably lifted eight favorites and assembled them into a box, and everyone copied it from there.
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Why haven’t toy laser gun sounds changed in 30+ years?
Probably because the real thing would be disappointing? Lasers don’t make noise, maybe you get some from a relay activating or a coil humming, but there is no bravado when turned on. Also lasers really aren’t visible… From a marketing perspective they are a horrible product to sell to kids / adults or put in movies. Throw in some movie magic and some marketing and now everyone knows what a laser “sounds” like.
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This cost cutting shows up in everything we buy. If you buy ten different Bluetooth shower speakers from ten different brands, they all suspiciously have the exact same user interface. Same three buttons, same LED blink pattern for pairing, same startup sound, etc.
Same with washing machines, dishwashers, power tools, etc. Every vertical has one or two control boards being made by the same one or two companies in China and being sold up the chain to manufacturers of all the products (which are then sold up again to be branded as whatever we buy).
Competition in capitalism is largely a lie. We’re all buying all the same stuff with different stickers on it.
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I’m over here like:
I don’t think, other than cap guns, any toy guns made noise as a kid. .Probably a combination of cost and my parents not wanting to hear it.
I remember going into Ben Franklin (which was sort of a general retail store in my small town) and my friend’s mom who worked there showed me this new toy gun. Now, I don’t know if it was a display or I am completely mis-remembering it, but I remember it being attached via cord to a box that had buttons or switches that changed to around a dozen different sounds. Which I remember thinking would be impractical to play with. Maybe it was corded so you could play with the demo, but not walk away with it.
I remember her showing me and I was like, “That is Greedo’s gun. That’s Walrus Man’s gun.” Assigning the Star Wars character that I felt fit that sound.
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Don’t they do that with car parts too, where they use a lot of the same parts across various models, and some are used by other manufacturers?
I remember seeing a video where if you look close at a Lamborghini blinker reflector it has a Ford logo. Order it from Lamborghini and it was like $150 bucks, or like $3 from Ford.
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Especially true when trying to identify who made the actual (Sears) “Kenmore” or “Craftsman” item now that Sears no longer exists (except for perhaps a credit card.)
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I blame it on Star Wars. After that movie came out kids were no longer happy with the simple whirr-whirr and sparks generated by the Space Ray Friction guns. I’m pretty sure those go way back to the late 1930s, early 1940s when the Buck Rogers movie serials came out.
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I don’t know… The guy behind Sea Monkeys1) also managed to sell invisible goldfish.
1) Who was racist AF.
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I’m pretty sure the earliest sound chips just integrated a 555 and all the components needed to make the sounds (and from what the video showed of the datasheets, LED drivers too) into a single IC.
The first chip design was probably expensive to develop, but going from a small circuit board with 10-20 components to a single chip would have saved money in the long run. Then I guess at some point other companies started cloning the chip, and it ended up everywhere a designer wanted something that could make sounds and maybe flash some lights too, all on the cheap. In the 1980’s, “Computerised Sounds!” was a tag line that could sell toys.
Cheap chips that could play back a recorded sample, didn’t seem to start popping up until the 1990’s.
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You can download the datasheets.
Oh my. One of the car alarms in the neighbourhood obviously used the HK620. The alarm that went off at odd times. Which may or may not had something to do with the kids in the neighbourhood.
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