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:
> Hi,
> 
> Long story short - I ended up looking a bit at the game Teleport, by Mike
> Abbott and published by Cavalier Computer, 1982.  Recognizing that Mike
> Abbott's other games had secret keys in them, and not seeing Teleport on
> my list, I thought I'd poke around in it.
> 
> I did find that it does have a few.  But what I also learned is that
> apparently this game is meant to use something called a Votrax speech
> synthesizer (best I can tell is that this was some sort of phoneme-based
> speech chip).  The interesting thing is that the phoneme text and the
> code to play the text is present, but I don't know what to get it to play
> through.  AppleWin and Mockingboard emulation doesn't seem to be enough. 
> What would this have played through in 1982?
> 
> Some of the secret keys are for playing secret messages; I can read the
> phoneme text for them in the code, but it would be neat to be able to
> play them (some look humorous). I can't think of any other secret keys
> like these, that lead to audio messages. There are also regular game
> messages to be played too.
> 
> Seems like a Mockingboard would be the nearest thing.  Any ideas on how to map it in?
> 
> ]HR

The SC-01 chip used in the first Sound-Speech Mockingboards is the direct
lineal descendant of the Votrax synthesizers. 

Like most phoneme-based speech synthesizers, it accepts a stream of bytes
(6-bits of which are the phoneme code). The chip signals when it is ready
for the next phoneme. 

You'll have to take a look at the code to determine how the program expects
to communicate with the synthesizer. The original Votrax was a serial
interface. The Mockingboard provides access indirectly through a port of a
6522 VIA. 

It shouldn't be to hard to retarget the synthesis code. 

I don't recall whether the phoneme codes were actually the same from Votrax
to SC-01, but it's probably no more than a mapping through a table to match
them up. ;-)

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