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

[Kevin <kevin@hackaday.com>]

On Thursday, November 8, 2012 11:47:33 PM UTC-6, 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 have squat experience with the old chips, and all the ones I have ever played with took in ASCII data and generated the sounds "in house", and those type of chips are still available though hobby interest.

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9811