A Sound Card Before Its Time

Re:A Sound Card Before Its Time by simulate on Friday August 17, 2018 @09:09AM (#17782516)

Radio Shack's TRS-80 had a voice synthesis box available for $399 way back in 1979:

http://www.trs-80.org/trs-80-voice-synthesizer/

Here's a YouTube demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeIJxXCh8P8

($399 in 1979 is equal to about $1399 in 2018)

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Re:A Sound Card Before Its Time by fanf2 on Friday August 17, 2018 @03:49PM (#17785232)

Superior Software’s SPEECH! for the BBC Micro: software speech synthesis on a machine with relatively anaemic sound hardware. It was so cool back in the 1980s :-)

http://www.triumphoverchallenges.com/working-at-superior-sof...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1hC7Vjl_EWY

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Re:A Sound Card Before Its Time by reaperducer on Friday August 17, 2018 @01:57PM (#17784587)

Around 1975/76 Byte magazine had a couple of very good articles about building a speech synthesizer for S-100 bus computers.

Since it was still the very early days of personal computing, it was very ELI5, so still very useful.

It's amazing how little data is needed to generate useable speech. If I ever get some free time, I want to see if I can use their schematic to make it work on RS-232.

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