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Re: Teleport use of Votrax speech synthesizer - how to get it to work?
On Friday, 9 November 2012 14:47:33 UTC+9, Hot Rod wrote:
> Hi,
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> 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.
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> 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?
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> 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.
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> Seems like a Mockingboard would be the nearest thing. Any ideas on how to map it in?
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> ]HR
I spoke to HotRod about this privately, but for the benefit of this thread:
AppleWin has rudimentary support for the 1st-gen Mockingboard Sound/Speech card's Votrax (aka SC01).
In AppleWin I used the SSI263's phonemes for SC01 emulation, but this is clearly only a rough approximation (but good enough for the 2 games that use the SC01! IE. Crimewave & Crypt of Medea). NB. if you compare the 2 chips' phoneme tables (each has 64 entries) they are in a different order and don't map 1:1 exactly.
The Mockingboard that AppleWin supports is therefore a hybrid card (but theoretically possible as a real HW device). It's a Mockingboard-C (+SSI263/SC02) additionally with Votrax/SC01.
For those interested in AppleWin's code to support this, see the (terse!) comment near the top of this AppleWin source file for info on SC01 register setup (via the 6522):
http://svn.berlios.de/wsvn/applewin/trunk/AppleWin/source/Mockingboard.cpp
Tom