Arcade machines from the golden age of gaming employed clever hardware and software techniques to deliver dynamic voice acting and lip-syncing, a significant technical challenge at the time. Unlike modern systems, they relied on dedicated components due to limited processing power. The primary method for voice storage was using ROM (Read-Only Memory) chips specifically designed for audio. These chips, often called "voice ROMs," stored pre-recorded audio samples. To save precious memory, sound data was heavily compressed using algorithms like ADPCM (Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation). This allowed developers to fit multiple voice lines into a small space.

For lip-syncing, arcade machines used a combination of pre-rendering and scripted sequences. The game's code would trigger a specific voice sample from the ROM chip. Simultaneously, it would instruct the graphics hardware to play a corresponding animation sequence for the character's mouth. These animations were not dynamically generated; instead, artists created a set of mouth shapes (or "visemes") for different phonetic sounds. The game would simply play the pre-drawn animation that most closely matched the sound being heard. The synchronization was achieved because both the audio playback and animation sequence were triggered from the same scripted event in the game's code, creating the illusion of real-time lip movement. This process was a testament to the ingenuity of developers working within the constraints of 1980s and 1990s technology.