The Intellivision Voice Synthesis Module was released in 1982, giving the 16-bit console the power of speech. But unfortunately, most other consoles weren’t quite as lucky. Sure, some systems, like the PC Engine CD and Nintendo Famicom, have the ability to play samples directly, so at least they can do pre-recorded speech. But the Sega Master System can’t even do that. So how do we manage?
This is the kind of obscure stuff the internet needs more of.
I had a cartridge on my C64 that did speech, It wasn’t great though as you can imagine, Later the Amiga had it built in but I have no idea how that worked, Might have to look it up now 🙂
The Atari 8bit had SAM, which sounded very much like the Amiga version that was all in software. Jay Miner was an amazing engineer!
A bit of background here : https://janderogee.com/projects/SerialSpeechSynthesisSAM/SerialSpeechSynthesisSAM.htm
https://www.atariarchives.org/creativeatari/Talk_is_Getting_Cheaper.php
So the Amiga one was all software ? I know it used a few libraries, Translator for one… I just didn’t know if there was a hardware element too. I am curious about that now, Will have to see if there is any source to look at.
The BBC Micro had the same sound chip, and Superior Software developed phoneme-based speech synthesis for it. As you can hear it tell you, you could speak any word in any language for just 7.5K of RAM, as opposed to 19K for this one short sample.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8wyUsaDAyI
I had the C64 version of Superior Software’s Speech!. It was based on synthesising the phonemes by various means. (I’m guessing it was the same code on the Beeb and the C64 until it came to the playback routine)
It killed off the official Acorn speech synthesiser which was apparently based on a Ti chip (Also present in Gauntlet and Roadblasters, among others) and a recording of Kenneth Kendall’s phonemes on a ROM. (Kenneth Kendall was a BBC news reader)
The Atari ST had a lot of variant, archived here : https://github.com/Kochise/atari-voxspell