RCH@cup.portal.com (Ric C Helton) (05/15/89)
On a closeout at Radio Shack, I purchased the two speech synthesis circuits (SP0256 Narroator Speech Processor and CTS256A-AL2 Code- to-speech Processing Chip) commonly used to build speech synth units for small computer applications. I got the chips both for under $10, and now I need to build the unit. The April 1985 Analog magazine has a project for building a unit that plugs into the Atari 800/XL/XE's joystick ports 0&1. It is a good hardware article, but I have seen somewhere a design for a circuit that uses the RS-232 port instead. Does anyone know where I could find this project? My idea is to hook the unit up with a y-cable to my modem, and have it speak the text it receives while BBSing and chatting. Heard of any Atari app's for this? Thanks for any reponse! -Ric Helton RCH@cup.portal.com -PO Box 2133, Athens, GA 30612-0133
cfchiesa@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (Christopher Chiesa) (05/16/89)
In article <18383@cup.portal.com>, RCH@cup.portal.com (Ric C Helton) writes (severely paraphrased here): > [...] (I) purchased two speech synthesis circuits [...] > [...] now I need to build the unit. > [...] I have seen somewhere a design for > a circuit that uses the RS-232 port [...] > > My idea is to hook the unit up with a y-cable to my modem, and > have it speak the text it receives while BBSing and chatting. > Heard of any Atari app's for this? > This reminds me of something I did several years ago in BASIC. I typed in the little "terminal emulator" program provided in the 850 Interface Technical Manual, and added a few lines so that text received from the modem line would be spoken by "S.A.M." - that's the Software Automated Mouth speech synthesis thing that came out in the early 80's... With very little work on my part, I had a "talking" terminal that would read me whatever came up on the screen. It was INVALUABLE for reading E-mail, as I could walk around my apartment, make lunch, etc., WHILE "READING" MY MAIL! S.A.M.'s only limitation was that it required a "pause" to process a line of text before speaking it -- so I implemented an automatic XON/XOFF to halt host transmission while S.A.M. was speaking, and it thereafter worked fine once you got used to the "gaps" in speech, S.A.M.'s rather oddly accented speech, etc. etc... A "S.A.M. handler" later appeared which allowed text to be PRINTed to a "V:" (for Voice, I imagine) device whereupon S.A.M. spoke it -- that was a little "cleaner" than the X=USR(...) call that I had to use. If anyone is interested in developing this old chestnut, I might be able to dig it up somewhere... Chris -- UUCP: <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee,uunet}!bsu-cs!cfchiesa cfchiesa@bsu-cs.UUCP