Re: Teleport use of Votrax speech synthesizer - how to get it to work?

[Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com>]

Hot Rod <hotrod.apple2@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday, November 13, 2012 7:38:39 AM UTC-6, BLuRry wrote:
>> If you find any good info about the sc01 synth internal workings please
>> let me know.  The data sheet only tells half of the story.
> 
> Haven't run across that yet.
> 
> It does seem like what Mockingboard does for speech is to convert the
> text into phoneme codes, and then save it in that form.  That's why I
> don't find the ASCII text for 'battle cruiser' in the example game (I
> think); it's because it's already been converted and saved.
> 
> So I think what I need to do ultimately is patch in the text to phoneme
> code converter before being able to send the data to the Mockingboard. 
> Before I can do that though, I need to decompose the Teleport program and
> see what all the pieces and memory use are.
> 
> As a quick hack though, I realized I could re-route the text stream that
> was being fed to the serial port to the ROM COUT routine and flip to the
> text screen to display what was being 'spoken' instead.
> 
> Will take more time.  If I do run across more info on the SC-01, I'll share.

The text-to-phoneme translation was very closely modeled on the work done
at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. There are lots of papers
on the web. 

Good luck on getting more detail on the SC chips--Votrax considered their
design a trade secret. However, they are designed as filtered formant
synthesizers, so they are not radically different from similar designs. 

Votrax started with a relatively simple discrete component design driven by
a serial interface. It was relatively inexpensive (thousand dollar range)
and small (shoebox). Their name refers to their VOcal TRAct simulation. The
moderate complexity of their implementation lent it to a digital
implementation on a chip, hence the SC-01 and the SC-02 (SSI 263). 

-michael - NadaNet 3.1 and AppleCrate II: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon