Date: Sun, 17 Aug 2008 00:00:04 -0700 From: "Scanning" <steven.alan.canning at verizon.net> Subject: Re: Speak and Swear To: "General Discussion: On-Topic Posts Only" <cctech at classiccmp.org> Message-ID: <001101c90036$e0942910$0301a8c0 at hal9000> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Little known ( I think... ) Speak & Spell trivia fact; The very first original S & Ss ( circa 1978 ?? ) with the hard molded buttons had swear words that the programmers had sneaked into the voice code ROMs. On mine you could access these by selecting the module ( with no ROM module plugged in ) and select level D. It would then say " Spell .... a bunch of garbage words, and then swear words" at the end . I have a .wav and an MP3 example of this little S & S Easter Egg... TI found out ( of course ) and recalled as many units as they could. If you can find one now they are quite rare and very entertaining. A special ed teacher I know used S & Ss to help her kids and was wondering why they kept laughing uncontrollably. They had figured out how to access the "special" words .... Best regards, Steven I have a 1978 (raised button) speak & spell here, and I tried what you said. While it does glitch out randomly (the speech rom is apparently accessing open bus instead of the module, and is saying gibberish which occasionally points to the valid internal rom), I'm not hearing anything that could be considered swear words. yet. Also, afaik the US speak&spell only had two rom revisions: CD2300/TMC0351 plus CD2301/TMC0352 in the 1978 one with the raised buttons (32KiB of total rom, 16KiB per chip) and CD2350 in the 1980 one with the membrane/flat keypad (16KiB total rom, probably a cost-cutting measure, only has half as many words I think) Which version was supposedly recalled? the earlier one? See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Lord_Nightmare (scroll down) to see all the CDxxxx chips I know of, and which ones have had their contents read out. (if you have any I'm missing, such as the UK speak&spell 78, or the italian grillo parlante, or the german 'buddy', email me off list) -- Jonathan Gevaryahu jgevaryahu(@t)hotmail(d0t)com jzg22(@t)drexel(d0t)edu