Re: Votrax chip SC01/SC02

[Allen Bong <allenbsf6502@gmail.com>]

On Aug 28, 7:13 am, "Michael J. Mahon" <mjma...@aol.com> wrote:
> Allen Bong wrote:
> > Hi Group,
>
> > Any one still remember the votrax speech synthesizer chip SC01 and
> > SC02 used in the mocking board sound card?  Does any one know where I
> > can get software to drive this chip.  Besides English, are there any
> > variants with other languages?
>
> The SC-02, more commonly known as the SSI-263, is a phoneme- or
> allophone-based synthesizer with 64 discrete phonemes built in.
>
> To produce words, strings of phonemes must be produced, with volume,
> pitch, and duration controlled by an attached computer.
>
> Although tables of "pre-compiled" words may be created, the most
> common use of the chip on the Apple II was in "text-to-speech" mode,
> in which a set of rules is used to generate phoneme strings from
> ASCII-coded English text.  With different tables, many other languages
> could also be pronounced, but there may be missing or subtly different
> phonemes for some other languages, or the tonal controls may be too
> coarse for some cases.
>
> There were also some phoneme sequencing rules that were required
> (think of a peephole optimizer) to prevent certain "pops" and
> other artifacts resulting from certain phoneme transition bugs.
> (The SC-01 had different, and perhaps fewer, such bugs.)
>
> > I have found a site using Z80 to control the SC01 but I think it was
> > too complicated.
>
> >http://trshare.triumf.ca/~amaudruz/votrax/index.html
>
> This is a complete single-board computer for controlling the SC-02
> in an editable fixed-vocabulary synthesizer.  This would be appropriate
> for, say, a menu response system.
>
> > What are  the modern chips with equilvalent functions and are well
> > supported?
>
> They are largely obsoleted by fast general purpose processors and
> inexpensive DSPs, which make speech synthesis entirely a software
> issue.
>
> These speech synthesis chips were primarily useful when the
> microcontrollers and computers were too slow to do the synthesis
> computations in software.
>
> -michael
>
> NadaPong: Network game demo for Apple II computers!
> Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/
>
> "The wastebasket is our most important design
> tool--and it's seriously underused."

Thanks Michael, that's a lot of informations for me.  How's the
quality of speech compared to SAM - Speech Automated Mouth ?

Are the software comptible with each other?


Allen