Re: GI chip

At 11:07 PM 5/7/97 GMT, you wrote:

I just ran across the "spec" sheets for the SP-250, over at a friends house.

(About the time Gorf came out I went down to Radio Shack and bought the
SP-256, then wrote a Text-to-Speech convertor just so I could get it to say
"Gorfian Robots Attack Attack" -- too bad it wasn't the same chip. Anybody
need a nice Text-to-Speech convertor written in 6800 assembly language?
Very nice algorithm, you have to be able to read the Smoke Signal
Broadcasting DOS diskettes though.)

So never the one to throw anything away, (me or my friend), we still had the
data book. Pretty worthless from a software point of view. Clay might be
interested since all it contained was two pages of interfacing information.
Pinouts, clock rates and duty cycles etc. It had one paragraph, and a
picture of how it works. It is a type of LPC (does TI have a patent on the
term LPC, since they're the only ones I've seen use that phrase). It
contains a 12 coefficient filter that models the vocal track, you send it
data in 16 (or maybe it was 15?) bit chunks, two writes per chunk, and these
"data chunks" set up the filters, pitches or not voiced, noise, etc. commands.

I only mention all this because the next page was a one page blurb on the
"SP-250" development kit. Since your description matches theirs to a "T",
I'm assuming that's what you've found.

The kit was to allow you to setup you're own phrases (no mention on how you
did this), and then be able to test the ROM using the kit. It's basically
the guts of their, later to be release, talking clock chip, using discrete
components.
Or same as the SP-256 with phrases in place of the phonemes.

You would have to have documentation of some kind to use these, and the
algorithms for compressing voice into the 12 coefficients, are very
involved. Still it might be fun playing with one, but then again isn't the
Sega speech card just a fancier form of their development card? Just a
different processor, and a bit more ROM space.

I think the funniest thing about the spec was the "over 1 billion phrases".
The pre-programmed phrases consisted of clock stuff "AM", "PM", etc. It
also contained all the phrases needed to count to 1 billion, so there's your
"over 1 billion phrases". Leave it to those marketing types! hee hee.

-Zonn

>Not sure if this is the right chip...
>
>I ran across the following board today:
>
>General Instrument
>VSM2032
>Voice Synthesis Module
> o Complete speech system
> o Simple digital interface
> o Calculator vocabulary
> o 32 words combine to form more than
> one-billion phrases
>
>3 chips on the board:
>1) SP-0250 Orator GI8136
>
>2) PIC 1650A GI8133
>
>3) RO-3-9333 32K ROM GI8144
>
>[only the ROM is socketed]
>
>
>15-pin edge connector:
>1) 5V 9) S5
>2) n.c. 10) S6
>3) /RESET 11) BUSY
>4) S0 12) n.c.
>5) S1 13) STROBE
>6) S2 14) SPKRET
>7) S3 15) SPK
>8) S4
>
>
>Rough count of 26 boards - all still in "retail" boxes FWIW.
>
>
>- Keith
> (713)771-8332
>
>
>
>
Received on Wed May 7 17:10:10 1997