Musings on my own bad memory

Memory is a fickle thing.

For instance, I believed the helmet on this system had over a dozen LEDs. Obviously I had confused it with another project. I imagined there was a speaker in the gun itself for the shooting sound. Maybe this was the case in some suits, but from what I've seen the speaker is in the helmet where it can be more clearly heard over the arena music track. My mistake, the gun sound board is in fact wired to the gun connector, as documented in this very blog. The sound board is not in the gun itself, however.

After seeing some of the old equipment, I seem to recall there being those peanut lights on either side of the face, but why are they there? My working theory is that they were originally meant to add a faint edge-lit glow to the face shield, but the shield wasn't used in the game so they may have fallen by the wayside. A second example of the equipment has LEDs there and so my refurbished helmet also does.

I had once imagined all discrete decade counters and 7-segment display encoders running the score display. Thank goodness the 74C925 was available when this unit was designed; it runs all 3 digits with its multiplexed output, a perfect choice for this application. There are decade counters but that's for counting scored points (and, by extension, for timing the delay before you can be hit again).