14 Jun
2001
14 Jun
'01
2:57 p.m.
I do believe you're right, Tony. I had an occasion to hook up both these chips
back in the early '80's when my partner got a couple of samples and wanted to
play with them. I attached the speech device to the printer port because I
envisioned packaging it together with an LM386 amp in a little speaker box, with
direct connection to the printer port. It worked adequately and my partner, a
very talented software weenie, had the thing talking quite well within an hour
or so. I began to regret I'd let him take it with him after seeing the fruits
of his effort a week later. I didn't think much of the chip, yet he'd gotten it
to where it spoke as well as he did, albeit in somewhat of a monotone.
Judicious use of the silences made the speech quite intellegible.
I don't remember a thing about the music chip. <sigh>
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tony Duell" <ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2001 5:46 PM
Subject: Re: Sound chips
>
> Wasn't the AY3-8910 a speech generator or is that a different gimmick? I
seem
> to remember having one somewhere in the
"pit." IIRC, it uses a 3.12 MHz
crystal
> in the then-popular application. It is, BTW, (if
it's the part I'm thinking
of)
easily
interfaced via the parallel printer port on nearly any Micro.
No, you're thinking of the SPO256-AL2 speech sythesiser chip. The -AL2
suffix BTW meant that the sounds were 'allophones' which could be
combined to make most Engish words. There were other, custom, versions
with different ROM programming which had limited vocabulary, but which
could say a complete word given a single command. Somewhere I have one of
those for a digital clock application.
The AY-3-8910 (and -8912, -8913) had 3 internal tone generators, an
noise generator, 'mixer', amplitude envelope generator, etc. They were
tone/music generator ICs. The difference between the 3 versions was that
the -8910 has 2 8 bit I/O ports, the -8912, 1 I/O port and the -8913
none.
All were designed to connect to a multiplexed address/data bus on the
processor side, but it wasn't hard to use them with most microprocessors.
They certainly turned up in a lot of machines (Oric, Einstein to name but
2 of the less obvious ones).
Incidentally, Tandy/Radio Shack sold a speech/sound cartridge for the
CoCo. It contained a microcontroller, an SPO256 speech chip and an
AY-3-891x sound chip. The microcontroller was programmed to do
text-to-speech conversions and to sequence the sound chip so it could
automatically play tunes, etc.
-tony