Hi Chris
Couple of things here. Ceefax and Oracle were both tweaked quite a bit before
they hit main stream TV's in the late 70s or early 80s. As for the teletext
adapter, no, you must have misheard that. The company was called "Morley",
("M, o, r, l, e, y"Not "Mari" electronics. This company was an Acorn
specialist I believe and they worked a lot on other BBC model B/B+/Master/Arc
development. Their teletext adapter was better and also cheaper than that
which Acorn offered because it could be used by open standards software which
we'd probably now call open source. My own software offering wouldn't work on
the Acorn because the top level application had to use specific methodology to
interface with the ROM manager that Acorn used and I never ever managed to get
to know how that was accomplished. I had intended to do that at one time, but
the information wasn't available.
As for the C64, I wrote a very rudimentary screen-reader which sat in RAM at
location 679 and dumped everything textually sent to the video port to the
C64's user port. In those days I had a little adapter which allowed me to
interface a "Braid System" speech synthesiser to the C64 using its parallel
input. The voice was dreadful, but not as bad as some of the more modern
software speech implementation, such as that horrible DecTalk 32 that ships
with Window-Eyes, and the Dectalk Express and Dectalk PC which used to be quite
popular for some reason.
The sound on the C64 was innovative for its day and could probably still hold a
candle to some more modern hardware of its type.
Gordon
On 26 May 2012, at 17:13, Chris Moore <[email protected]> wrote:
Can you believe Ceefax actually came out in 1974? and then Oracle ITV adopted
the same standard in 1976?
It is a shame our digital services which are available via the red button on
our TVs are not accessible.
I used to own a Commodore 64, man I loved that beast. The SID sound chip was
purely awesome and I also remember MARI in Wallsend on Davy Bank. I used to
know a few local programmers who were training there.
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