What are the slots for in a 6-switch? speakers?

[sharopolis]

I've just got hold 2 light 6-switchers and whilst dissassembling one of them to see if there was anything I could do about a sound fault I noticed that the casing had 2 round sections moulded into it where the ridged surface has slots in it. These look to me very much like speaker holes, did the original design have speakers in it or are these just for cooling?

My vader doesnt have these slots, and they don't look much like you'd expect cooling slots to look like, they aren't over the heat sink anyway.

Theres also a hell of a lot of space in the case left over at either side of the main board where a set of speakers would fit perfectly. What with Atari's cost cutting, it seems strange that the 2600 would have the extra redundant bits unless they were planned to be used.

Is this what it was or am I just imagining things?

Sorry if this has already been well documented, but I've not found any mention of this anywhere.

[CPUWIZ]

http://www.atariage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=46460

[Rob Mitchell]

Yes .. Atari initially intended to mount two speakers in the 2600. Thus the deck looks like a speaker grill. The custom 2600 TIA chip has two sound pins for two sound channels .. which are wired together for the sound out through the TV.

 

Imagine Combat (or other early games) with left tank sounds coming out of the left speaker and right tank sounds coming out of the right speaker. Atari wisely dumped the idea so the sound comes from the action on the TV .. and not the console. Plus there is no spot on the console for controlling the volume.

 

Rob Mitchell, Atlanta, GA

[keilbaca]

On my modded Atari, I was actually thinking about putting in two speakers, both mono... adding that to my list of things i want to do to it (power light and possibly a pause switch).

[Rob Mitchell]

My modified 2600 has Lumina, Chroma, 2 sound channels out, built in Autofire, and Tank Tread Control circuit. It also has a momentary open pushbutton for when I was using it with the Cuttle Cart. You want to put a switch on the two speakers to have the option of mixing the sound to come out of both speakers.

 

Rob Mitchell, Atlanta, GA

[mos6507]

BTW, for thsoe who don't know, the early coinop games often had two speakers in them which represented independent sound channels, like dual-channel mono. Tank works this way, for instance.