A few days ago there was some discussion of speech and sound chips, which prompted me to dig in the spares box and extract a TMS5220 speech processor and the ROM that goes with it, made by Texas Instruments. For those who don't know, this was a rather interesting speech processor: it worked by setting up digital filters to model certain characteristics of the human vocal tract, and then used those filters (dynamically adjusted) to turn white noise (simulating moving air) or other sounds into speech. The ROM didn't store digitised sound at all, instead it stored the information about what type of source to use and what filter parameters to set up. Hence it was not much use for anything except speech, but it did a pretty good job of that and used less memory than, say, a Digitalker did (I have a Digitalker chip set as well). The TMS5220 was most often used with special serial ROMs, and was used as the (optional) speech processor in the BBC Microcomputer -- that's why I have a couple of sets. It was also used in some arcade machines, in one if the Texas home micros (TI99/8?), one of the Coleco machines (I think), and an obscure British 68000-based machine called a uMicro 2000. Texas made a couple of standard vocabulary Phrase ROMs, and custom ones for particular pusposes. The arcade machines and BBC Micro used custom PHROMs, -- TMS6100NLL in the Beeb -- but one I have out of a uMicro 2000 has a generic part number: VM61002NL. I know that the first standard vocabulary ROM was type VM61001NL so I imagine what I have is another standard part. Alas, I can no longer find the data sheets for either the TMS5220 or the PHROMs, and a web search hasn't turned up anything useful. Texas' website no longer has any info on those devices, neither does the company who deal with their obsolete products. Does anyone have any information about these things? I'd like to see (or hear!) what's in the PHROM I've found. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York