Hi, I want to make a program that takes recorded speech and transforms it so it sounds like it's coming from a Texas TI-99. Do you have any good ideas and resources for how to go about that?
A:
Most of those old speech synthesizers were build directly in-chip. Perhaps you could find a synthesizer that sounds like the chip, but if you really want the original sound, you would either have to simulate the chip (I don't know if it's a simple matter, perhaps the chip internals aren't published).
I only know because I burnt out a number of the Radio Shack speech synthesizer ICs before I managed to get a SP0256-AL2 working.
If you're more of a do-it yourself type guy, you need to find out which IC actually drove the speech synthesis in a TI-99, and then build the chip up on a bread board. That's what I was trying to do back then, and I managed to get the chip to speak, but lost patience after I fried my third chip due to a mis-wiring issue when I attempted to attach it to my PC's parallel port. I think this was the book I was using back then, but there's no cover art featured so it's hard to know for sure.
If you are familiar with how to use ROM images, there seems to be a gentleman that has managed to refeverse engineer the ROM image out of a SP0256-AL2. Look here for the image and the incredible granted permission to do the work and distribute the results.
Edwin Buck
2010-06-10 16:18:50
A:
You could start with open source that does something similar: Adding Robotic/Vocoder effect to your song using Audacity
James Roth
2010-06-10 16:24:55
If you just want old-sounding speech synthesis, that's a good option. If you really must have the TI-99 speech synthesis, odds are that it will always sound a bit off.
Edwin Buck
2010-06-10 16:30:05