7 May
1998
7 May
'98
1:51 p.m.
Oh wow - I'd *love* to have a Computalker! I wanted one SOOOO bad
when I was 15, had just built my IMSAI, and had just seen "Wargames",
but they were SOOOO expensive! I even got the demo cassette with
recorded speech from one. I still have it. I've had lots of
computers with speech synthesizers on them since then, but I've still
always wanted a CT1. Would you be interested in selling it, or
trading it for something? There's a blurb about it in the Tandy
catalog on my web page, in the "accessory boards" section. "Highly
Intelligible, Quite Natural Sounding Speech, Uses Standard S-100 Bus,
Phono Jack Audio Output. Sounds are defined in real time under
software control. The synthesizer is controlled by 9 acoustic
parameters which represent the phonetic structure of human speech.
They are transmitted to the CT-1 at a rate of 500 to 900 bytes per
second, depending on the data compression techniques used."
On Fri, 8 May 1998 01:35:35 +0100 (BST), you wrote:
One is a Computalker CT1 Speech Systhesiser. It contains a pair of potted
modules (Formant and Control), a few TTL chips, a DAC and some analogue
stuff. There's an RCA (phono) socket, presumably audio out. I know
_nothing_ about this board - does anyone recognise it.
The other board is a Heuristics Speechlab. It's essentially a speech
input board and contains some analogue filters, an ADC, etc. I got a
hardware manual (including schematics) with this one. There are also 3
paper tapes (Hardware test, speech BASIC, speech recognition demo). I've
not read these yet, but a quick glance by eye makes me thing they're
Intel hex object programs. Alas I don't have the software manual. Does
anyone recognise this unit?
-tony
-Bill Richman
bill_r(a)inetnebr.com
http://incolor.inetnebr.com/bill_r
(Home of the COSMAC Elf Simulator!)