Re: G80 speech board

>-----------
>| |
>| |
>| ---- |
>| | |
>| | |
>-----------

Kinda looks like a "GI" logo to me...

>next to this 'GI...and it is that rectangular, unlike the orator's "curvy"
>GI... is the number 8048 CCA and TAIWAN.

Hmmmm. Could just be a manufacturer's number I suppose.

>And one more thing I just noticed...on the board I have
>without the ORATOR, there is a national semiconductor 8039 (exact numbers
>are 014C INS8039N-6 /P8039-6)...on the board with the ORATOR there is
>an Intel P8035HL L2468201. Hope this helps!!! Thanks

Huh. That's interesting. I don't know the 8035/9 off the top of my head,
so it might just be an internal/external ROM thing. I'll try to remember
to look it up.

I started thinking about that 32034 number that Al saw. That sure looks
like a TI DSP to me. I'd suspect the 320C3x family. Weird. They had
inboard ROM and it's quite possible it was just running an LPC algorithm.
I always thought that the Orator sounded like LPC, but was never able to
really confirm it. This was some e-mail between me (the ">" part and the
guy that designed the TMS5220 "--" the LPC chip Atari used in Star Wars
and Gauntlet, etc...)

>I have a kind-of trivia question for you. Since you've been doing voice
>compression for quite a while I wonder if you ever ran across or knew
>anything about the General Instruments SPO-250 "Orator" chip. The
>SPO-256AL2 was their little phoneme synth that was used in quite a few
>gizmo's of the early 80's (maybe the Intellivision Voice module I think),
>but the Orator was used in some Sega Arcade games (like Star Trek) and
>sounded *very* nice for the era. I assumed that it was some form of LPC
>since the voices didn't really sound digitized like an ADPCM or something.
>Very faint "robotic" overtones sometimes on vowels... Any thoughts?
>
-- I definitely remember the name and number, and I'm pretty sure that I've
--seen a spec sheet for it. The memories are faint (and not just about speech
--stuff!), but I think this was a formant synthesizer. The SP0256 was
--essentially the same part preprogrammed with a phoneme/allophone set. At
--the time, formant synthesizers were the clear favorites for doing
--text-to-speech. Conventional wisdom was that "they" would have the kinks
--worked out of TTS in short order and then there would be no need for voice
--coders- at least for playback-only systems. Co-incidentally, that was about
--the time one of my partners here started on his 8-year TTS research project
--at CNET in France. In spite of being one of the world's best systems at the
--time, neither it nor the others have ever really been good enough for the
--big time-- Michel refuses to touch the stuff now!
-- Back to the 0250; the problem for formant synthesizers in that period was
--(the lack of) automatic formant tracking. As it happens, the most popular
--filter control parameters these days are line spectrum pairs (of
--frequencies- LSPs) which come pretty close to tracking what a shadetree
--like myself would consider to be formants, though this time around, no one
--pretends that there's a one-to-one relationship. Sorry-- got carried away
--there.....

Hmmmm. Beats the hell out of me. :-)

-Clay

Clayton N. Cowgill Engineering Manager
_______________________________________________________________________
/\ Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc. clay@supra.com
\/ Communications Division http://www.supra.com/
Received on Mon May 5 15:53:55 1997