Re: Vic-20 speech synthesis system by S.T. Currah 22/10/82

From: Daniel Kahlin (tlr_at_stacken.kth.se)
Date: 2003-09-28 11:43:13

Hi,

This page:
  http://www.robotprojects.com/voice/voice.htm

Lists the Currah Speech 64 as using a SP0256-AL2, which is a speechsynth
by General Instruments, later Microchip.  You give it the number of an 
allophone, and it will speak it.  
Note that the SP0256-AL2 is a regular SP0256 with a standard set of 
allophones integrated in a mask-rom.  You may still give it an external 
rom though.

SP0256-AL2 datasheet: 
  http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~concuss/concussor/words.pdf

General datasheets:  
  http://dsplib.com/chips/sp025x.html

Disection of the instruction set:
  http://spatula-city.org/~im14u2c/intv/tech/sp0256_instr_set.html

/Daniel 

On Sat, 27 Sep 2003, Larry Anderson wrote:

> One of my favorite voice sythesisers, definitely european in the
> inflection it gives for letters.  It uses phonetic parts to make it's
> vocabulary and doesn't have a preset word list like the Magic Voice -
> with it's built-in SAY command its easy to  make it SAY just about
> anything. 
> 
> If it is anything like the Currah Speech Master for the 64 typing
> 
> INIT
> 
> will turn it on, and then using the command
> 
> SAY [speed] "text"
> 
>  would speak the text, adding the speed setting - a 0 or 1 - would use
> either the low or high speed/pitch voice.  To get keyboard echo (where
> it speaks each key typed) is
> 
> KON [speed]
> 
> and to turn it off is
> 
> KOFF
> 
> I have the 64 manual around here somewhere, it goes into some ML
> programming and cheking a pointer to see when the talking is finished
> (so not to overlap speech commands.)  Will look for it...
> 
> Larry 
> Marko Mäkelä wrote:
> > 
> > Hi all!
> > 
> > Today I fixed a VIC-20 (broken 7406 on the serial bus) and got an Amiga mouse,
> > a Commodore mouse and a Vic-20 speech synthesis cartridge in return.
> > 
> > The cartridge contains an audio circuit, some logic glue and two ROM-looking
> > chips.  The program ROM is 2 kilobytes, and it hooks itself presumably to
> > the GETIN vector, saying the names of letters and some keys (home, return,
> > cursor, equals, multiply, pound, etc.) as they are typed.
> > 
> > Does anyone know anything about this cartridge?  The cover says "Adman
> > Electronics, Made in England, Speech Synthesiser".  The cartridge also
> > hooks to the audio/video connector via a pass-through cable.
> > 
> > The speech quality is slightly better than S.A.M. 64.  Speaking of speech,
> > the most recent pwp production (Robotic Liberation) features pretty
> > understandable speech (or singing) on the unexpanded PAL VIC-20.
> > 
> >         Marko
> > 
> >        Message was sent through the cbm-hackers mailing list
> 
> 



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