I used to have Currah speech for the c64. It was a cartridge that had a din cable coming out the back of it which you plugged into the audio 5 pin audio in socket next to the cartridge slot of the C64. I think it cost £29 at the time (1984) and you used the say command within your C64 basic to get it to speak.
You can hear a sample at:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBx1nTcVPEU&feature=related Chris On 29 May 2012, at 16:55, Martin McCormick wrote: > I figured at the time that a person could write an > interrupt service routine or an extra patch of code just as you > described. > > The Apple II had an interrupt but nothing on board used > it, not even the keyboard. I had a Mountain Hardware > clock/calendar board plugged in to the mother board which > actually did supply an interrupt once per second and I did play > with it a bit, but you had to butcher up the clock board to get > any more frequent interrupts than once per second and I just > didn't see the value in that at the time. > > As for the access interface, I started out with a > routine that fit in to low RAM which hooked the address for the > screen buffer and converted all the data that could be converted > in to Morse Code. That was sure a start since I already knew > Morse, but the TSI speech board and the Votrax were each a big > step up from the other. > > While we are on the topic, the sound generator in the > C64 was spectacular compared with anything else at the time. The > Apple II had a D-type flip-flop for both the loud speaker and > for the cassette tape interface. To make sounds, you addressed > which ever one of those devices you wanted and that would cause > the strobe to pulse which stepped the flip-flop from the state > it was in to the next state so, for example, to make a 1000 HZ > tone, you wrote a counter routine to hit that address 2000 times > a second which cycled it on then off, then on again for as many > times as your counter was set to loop. > > The IBM P.C. systems had a slightly more versatile noise > maker in that there was a programmable counter on a dedicated > chip which you could set to a 16-bit number which determined the > pitch of your tone. The counter/timer chip received a roughly > 1-MHZ clock signal and your tones were whatever frequency you > got by setting the counter to any number from 1 to 65535 with > that value giving you a buzz around 25 or 30 HZ. > > The C64, on the other hand could have generated speech > as it had a 3-voice chip as you mention below. > > Had my life gone a little differently, I probably would > have been really proficient in the C64 as it was quite the > machine in its day. > > You say, > >> 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 synthesizer 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. > > DecTalk always reminded me of somebody who had had a few > too many or who had suffered some trauma that one might be > curious about but prudence would keep one from asking any > probing questions. > > You said, > >> 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. > > It definitely could. What we have here is evolution. DSP > chips of which the C64's sound generator is one are an example > of dedicated hardware doing one thing extremely well and it > probably wouldn't be worth a darn doing anything else. > > It sounds like we were playing with similar toys in the > eighties. I ended up learning the Motorola 68HC11 which is a > digital controller chip. It is a 6800 processor with some > timers, interrupts and an A/D converter. > > It had a monitor ROM one could use to develop > assembly-level programs so you could use it to control whatever > your imagination desired. The 68HC11 was originally designed to > be the engine control unit in 1980's-era cars. > > I had a lot of fun playing with the 68HC11 as it was a > lot like the 6502 except you could sure do a lot more addressing > modes and therefore more powerful programming. > > So long for now. > > Martin > > ======================================= > > The Techno-Chat E-Mail forum is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus > and worm-free > > To modify your subscription options, please visit for forum's dedicated web > pages located at > http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/techno-chat > > You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Techno-Chat group at > either of the following websites: > > http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/techno-chat/index.html > > Or: > <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> > you may also subscribe to this list via RSS. The feed is at: > <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml> > > --------------------------------------- ======================================= The Techno-Chat E-Mail forum is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free To modify your subscription options, please visit for forum's dedicated web pages located at http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/techno-chat You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Techno-Chat group at either of the following websites: http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/techno-chat/index.html Or: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> you may also subscribe to this list via RSS. The feed is at: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml> ---------------------------------------
