Mockingboard

[jesse@dino.gi.alaska.edu (Jesse P. Atencio)]

For those people that e-mailed me about the Mockingboard and anyone else
interested, here is what I know of the Mockingboard.

The Mockingboard was made by a company called Sweet Micro Systems (now
defunct) and they made several different models of the Mockingboard.

Mockingboard Sound 1
Mockingboard Sound II
Mockingboard Speech I
Mockingboard Sound/Speech I

So...since I don't remember the layout of the card and the chips on it, it
is difficult for me to determine which one was being inquired about here
on this news group.  There was a mention of an empty socket.  I would
think that the empty socket was probably for a Speech synthesizer chip. 
The chip was called the SC-01 and was manufactured by a company called
Votrax.  The chip was what was called a phoneme synthesizer that could
produce continuous speech with the use of 64 phonemes that consisted of 36
vowel sounds, 25 consonant sounds and 3 pause phonemes.  If the board was
missing the chip, then it would be a sound board only.  Which one, I am
not sure unless it was silk screened onto the board somewhere.  

These boards were controlled with a Synertek SY6522 I/O chip.  It
controlled a General Instrument AY-3-8910 Programmable Sound Generator
chip for Sound generation.  

Sound I - was a single sound generation product
Sound II- was capable of generating two independent sounds at once
Speech I - was capable of generating speech
Sound/Speech -was capable of generating sound and speech at same time.

This selection could satisfy just about every application one could have.

I do have the software for this beastie and the manual.  I sold my system
that used it to someone that wanted it for the game support.  Zaxxon and
Sky FOX were two outstanding games that supported this card.  Other speech
/ sound products also existed but none were as sophisticated as the
Mockingboard.  The Echo was one of them.

I sure wish someone would port SKY FOX over to the //GS.  It was a killer
of a game and would be well suited to the //GS sound and graphics.  This
was one game that I was devastastated when I found out it wouldn't run on
my //GS.