Re:A Sound Card Before Its Time
by reassembled on Friday August 17, 2018 @05:08AM
(#17781361)
Did anyone here ever have the speech synthesizer card for the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A computer? I remember playing a game called Parsec on that computer and if you had the speech synth plugged into the expansion port of the TI the game would speak at times.
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There were lots of speech synthesizer cards for 8 bit machines. What they had in common was the SP0256 chip (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Instrument_SP0256) which could synthesize speech by chaining together a series of phonemes. Or you could use the phonemes to create "pew-pew"-type special effects for games as I did ...
Re:A Sound Card Before Its Time
by reaperducer on Friday August 17, 2018 @02:31PM
(#17784812)
I didn't have the 99/4A, but my neighbor did, and had the speech synthesizer. I remember Parsec quite well.
I had a C-64, and had both the Covox Voice Master (...ter ...ter ...ter), and Commodore's Magic Voice.
Interesting that the Commodore box had to go into the cartridge port and the monitor port just for voice output, but the Covox could do both in and out from the joystick port.