Re: Ensoniq capabilities

[D Finnigan <dog_cow@macgui.com>]

Steven Weyhrich wrote:
> My Apple II History states that the Ensoniq chip is capable of speech
> synthesis. However, when I was questioned about this, I was unable to come
> up with any examples when that was actually used. Some other sound
> hardware
> released in the 1980s allowed use of phonemes to create speech, but I am
> not aware of any simple speech abilities in the IIGS.
> 
> Does anyone know of whether the IIGS could do speech with the Ensoniq, or
> was my source (wherever it was) incorrect about that?
>

As others have said, the Ensoniq is a general-purpose chip. There were
peripherals made for the earlier Apple models that were dedicated to speech
synthesis.

The Ensoniq requires more code behind it to make ad-hoc speech synthesis. I
suspect that most but not all GS programs that had speech in them were using
pre-recorded samples.

-- 
]DF$
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