GOSOF

Gottlieb Soundboard on FPGA

HW 5.x / SW 7.98

user manual

ralf@lisy.dev

v1.01 04.11.2026

German version: GOSOF_HW5x_Bedienungsanleitung.html. French version: GOSOF_HW5x_manuel_utilisateur.html. The chapter numbering is the same in all three.

Table of contents

• Important remark
• 1. Introduction
• 2. PCB
  • 2.1. LEDs
• 3. Installation
  • 3.1. System 80 and System 1
• 4. DIP switch settings
  • 4.1. S1: SB options
  • 4.2. S2: game select
  • 4.3. S3: options
• 5. Testing
  • 5.1. Gosof test button
  • 5.2. Gottlieb test button
  • 5.3. Option DIP 4: test mode
  • 5.4. Input test S5
• 6. DFPlayer Mini
  • 6.1. Files on the SD card
• 7. Programming the FPGA
• 8. Game ROMs
• Appendix A: game select
• Appendix B: making your own slot files
  • B.1. The slot decides the soundboard
  • B.2. Layout of the 4 KB file
  • B.3. Example

Important remark

By using GOSOF it is possible to damage your pinball machine. As this is a private project with NO commercial interest, the author accepts no liability for any damage that may arise by using GOSOF!

1. Introduction

GOSOF is a 100% hobby project: a replacement for the Gottlieb System 1 and System 80 soundboards, built around an FPGA that runs the original sound ROMs.

Version 5 differs from the earlier boards in two ways:

• The FPGA sits on a plugged-in EP4CE6E22C8N core board. It is mounted upside down on the GOSOF PCB.
• There is no SD card for the game ROMs. They are stored in the configuration flash (EPCS4) of the core board, next to the FPGA program. The micro SD card in the DFPlayer Mini only holds speech and music files.

2. PCB

2.1. LEDs

• D1 (trigger): ON if an input sound signal from the CPU is detected. D1 blinking signals an empty slot in the flash, meaning there is no ROM for the selected game (see chapter 8).
• D2 (sound): ON during sound output.

The LED on the DFPlayer Mini goes ON while speech or music is playing. The LEDs of the core board are hidden, because the board is mounted upside down.

3. Installation

The Gosof board has the same connectors and the same mounting holes as the original Gottlieb soundboards, so replacing the board can be done in seconds.

Gosof fits Gottlieb 'export' and 'non export' versions.

Note: In case you exchange your export version soundcard for Gosof and choose the 'speech' version, you need to replace your MPU ROM! Games with export versions of Gottlieb soundcards have ROMs installed which can only play 15 different sounds, whereas the speech soundboard can play up to 31 different sounds.

3.1. System 80 and System 1

The PCB has one connector for each system, marked System80 and System1.

• System 80: Leave the five jumper positions of K5 open.
• System 1: Close all five jumper positions of K5 ('5x close for System1').

4. DIP switch settings

4.1. S1: SB options

This DIP switch bank has the same functionality as the DIP switch bank on your original soundboard. Take a look at your Gottlieb manual.

For 'small' soundboards which have only two DIP switches, use DIP switches 1 and 2 of the bank (usually OFF). For 'big' soundboards it is the complete DIP bank. Usually you have to switch ON DIP 5 and 6 (speech and background sound enable). DIP 7 and 8 are not used.

4.2. S2: game select

Each program can emulate a number of different Gottlieb soundcards. With this DIP switch bank you select which game will be emulated. For a complete list take a look at Appendix A.

4.3. S3: options

With DIP 1 you can adjust the CPU clock and with it the pitch of the tones.

5. Testing

Gosof provides several options for testing.

5.1. Gosof test button

By pressing the 'Gosof' test button, Gosof will play all possible 30 sounds (15 in case of 'small' soundboards) for the configured game.

5.2. Gottlieb test button

With option DIP 3 ON, the 'Gottlieb' test button acts like the test switch of the original soundboard.

With option DIP 3 OFF, it plays the version announcement: "This is Gosof version 7.98 from lisy dot dev". This also works without a DFPlayer Mini.

5.3. Option DIP 4: test mode

With option DIP 4 ON, the sound number to play (the signal from the CPU) is spoken by the DFPlayer Mini instead of playing the specific sound. Pressing the 'Gosof' test button with this option ON will say the numbers from 1 to 31.

5.4. Input test S5

K2 connects the five sound inputs from the CPU to the button S5. Put a jumper on one position of K2 and press S5 to activate that input, without the CPU board. D1 lights up while the input is active.

6. DFPlayer Mini

Gosof uses a small device, the DFPlayer Mini, for sound that comes from files. The files are stored on a standard micro SD card in the player.

You need the DFPlayer Mini for:

• speech from MP3 files (option DIP 2 ON)
• background music with System 1 and MA-55 games
• the test mode (option DIP 4 ON)

Gottlieb games with speech are: Mars, Volcano, Black Hole, Devil's Dare, Rocky, Striker, Q*Bert's Quest and Caveman. These are the MA-216 games, for which the Votrax emulation (option DIP 2 OFF) can produce the speech without a DFPlayer Mini.

6.1. Files on the SD card

A ZIP file containing all speeches is provided on lisy.dev. Just extract the ZIP archive and copy its content to a micro SD card. The speech folders look like this:

10 - Mars
12 - Volcano
14 - Black Hole
18 - Devils Dare
20 - Rocky
23 - Striker
25 - Q*Bert's Quest
63 - Caveman
64 - Test (numbers)

7. Programming the FPGA

The configuration flash on the core board needs to be programmed through the connector marked 'Programming' (K1). The current FPGA software is on the repository server: https://lisy.dev/swrep/soundboards

You need:

• a USB Blaster which supports JTAG
• a power supply for the board while programming, as the USB Blaster does not power the board
• the Quartus programmer software (v21.1 for Windows is at https://lisy.dev/swrep/FPGA/Quartus/)
• the jumpers VIOB and VIOC on the core board set to 3.3 V

Program the file GOSOF80_HW5.x_v7.98.jic in JTAG mode. After programming, switch the power off and on again.

This file contains no game ROMs, because they are copyrighted. With this file alone D1 blinks and there is no sound. Add the ROMs as described in the next chapter.

Have a look at the documentation on the web page: https://lisy.dev/documentation-01.html

8. Game ROMs

The ROMs share the configuration flash with the FPGA program, so you program one .jic file that contains both. The flash has 64 slots of 4 KB, one per setting of DIP bank S2.

The script add_roms_to_jic.ps1 copies your ROMs into the released .jic and writes a new one. It runs on any Windows PC with the built-in Windows PowerShell. You need neither Quartus nor the source code, only:

• the released .jic, e.g. GOSOF80_HW5.x_v7.98.jic
• add_roms_to_jic.ps1, which is next to the .jic on https://lisy.dev/swrep/soundboards (and in the folder scripts of https://github.com/bontango/Gosof80)
• your own copy of the game ROMs, either as an image of a GOSOF HW 2.x SD card (e.g. Gosof_Image_v1.21.img), or as one 4 KB file per game, built as described in Appendix B

Put everything into one folder, open a command prompt there and type one of these commands:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File add_roms_to_jic.ps1 -Jic GOSOF80_HW5.x_v7.98.jic -Image Gosof_Image_v1.21.img
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File add_roms_to_jic.ps1 -Jic GOSOF80_HW5.x_v7.98.jic -RomDir roms

• -Image takes all games of the SD card image. Their slots are listed in Appendix A.
• -RomDir takes the slot files in the folder roms. Each file name starts with the slot number, e.g. 00_mars.bin or 24_pinkpanther.bin. Files with other names are ignored.
• You can give both options. The files from -RomDir then replace the games from the image.

The script writes GOSOF80_HW5.x_v7.98_roms.jic and lists the slot, soundboard and reset vector for each game. Program this file as described in chapter 7. Do not distribute it, because it contains the ROMs. The released .jic stays unchanged.

The script stops with ERROR if the .jic is damaged or does not match HW 5.x. It shows a WARNING if a file does not look like a program for the soundboard of its slot. This usually means the file is in the wrong slot or was put together in the wrong order. Check it against Appendix B before you program the board.

To see which slots of a .jic hold a game:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File add_roms_to_jic.ps1 -Jic GOSOF80_HW5.x_v7.98_roms.jic -List

If D1 blinks after programming, there is no ROM for the game selected on S2.

Appendix A: game select

S1 to S6 in this table are the switches 1 to 6 of the DIP switch bank S2 on the PCB. The games are the ones of the GOSOF SD image v1.21, in the slots where add_roms_to_jic.ps1 -Image puts them. Slot = the slot in the flash, see Appendix B. The soundboard of a game follows from its slot.

Appendix B: making your own slot files

With -RomDir, add_roms_to_jic.ps1 takes one file of exactly 4096 bytes per game. The file name starts with the slot number (00 to 63), followed by _, -, a space or a dot. This appendix describes how to build such a file from the original ROMs of a soundboard. You need your own copy of the ROMs. They are not provided with GOSOF.

B.1. The slot decides the soundboard

The slot is the setting of DIP bank S2: count 1 for S1 ON, 2 for S2 ON, 4 for S3 ON, 8 for S4 ON, 16 for S5 ON and 32 for S6 ON. The slot also tells GOSOF which soundboard to emulate. This affects the address decoding, the interrupts and the inputs, so a game only runs in a slot of its own soundboard type:

Within its range a game can go into any slot, with these exceptions:

• Slots 0 to 7 (MA-216): the speech from the DFPlayer Mini (option DIP 2 ON) is tied to the slot: speech folder, which sounds are speech, and the attract mode speech belong to Mars, Volcano, Black Hole, Devil's Dare, Rocky, Striker, Q*Bert's Quest and Caveman in this order (see chapter 6.1). Keep these games in their slots. If you put another MA-216 game into one of these slots, use the Votrax emulation (option DIP 2 OFF).
• Slot 24 (MA-55): reserved for Pink Panther. GOSOF treats one of its sounds in a special way. Do not put another game there.

A file in a slot of the wrong type does not start; the script then shows a WARNING.

B.2. Layout of the 4 KB file

The FPGA has two 2 KB ROMs. The first 2 KB of the slot file go into ROM 1, the second 2 KB into ROM 2. What has to be in them depends on the soundboard. Areas marked "unused" are never read; fill them with FF.

MA-216 and MA-309 (two 2 KB ROMs, PinMAME names xxx-s1.snd and xxx-s2.snd):

MA-55 and System 1 (one 1 KB game ROM, plus the 1 KB ROM inside the 6530 RRIOT of the soundboard):

The 6530 ROM holds the start of the program, so it must be the one of the right system.

MA-490 (one 2 KB ROM, e.g. 685-s.snd):

B.3. Example

In a command prompt in the folder with the ROM files, first make two filler files of 1 KB and 2 KB with FF:

powershell -Command "[IO.File]::WriteAllBytes('ff1k', [byte[]](,0xFF * 1024))"
powershell -Command "[IO.File]::WriteAllBytes('ff2k', [byte[]](,0xFF * 2048))"
mkdir roms

Then put the files together with copy /b. The order of the parts is the order in the tables above:

copy /b 666-s1.snd + 666-s2.snd roms\00_mars.bin
copy /b 669-s1.snd + 669-s2.snd roms\08_hauntedhouse.bin
copy /b 652.snd + ff1k + 6530sy80.bin + ff1k roms\16_panthera.bin
copy /b 685-s.snd + ff2k roms\32_rackemup.bin
copy /b 429.snd + ff1k + 6530sys1.bin + ff1k roms\48_totem.bin

Every file in roms must have exactly 4096 bytes. Then add them to the .jic as described in chapter 8. For each game, the script shows where the 6502 reset vector points. If there is no program start, it shows a warning, for example:

slot 40  MA-490    reset 2902  40_hauntedhouse.bin
          WARNING: no program start found for a MA-490 (reset vector 2902) - wrong slot, or file put together wrongly? See appendix B.

This check catches a wrong slot type and parts in the wrong order. It cannot tell whether the file belongs to the game you meant, so set S2 according to the slot number of the file name.