Re: Speech board idea...

Ok let me have a try at this thinking thing... (yikes!)

I've always thought a nice idea for the universal sound card, if you have
the cabinet space, is to just go to the swap meet, find yourself a cheapo
386/486 PC-clone, and a sound card -- a downloadable wavetable card would be
the best since it would allow the use of the slower x86 processors, and have
much nicer sound than the Sounblaster knockoffs.

There. All the hardware you need, already designed, tested, readily available.

Now write the software that allows sounds to be controlled through the
serial/parallel ports.

You have to write the software regardless of what hardware you use, the PC
has the advantage of being it's own developement kit, and if you check out
the MAME repository you'll find documentation on sound cards, source for
emulation of sound on many different games, etc.

And there you go. One universal sound card. Ok you might have to have some
sort of interface card, depending on the game. The Cinematronics games
should be able to interface directly to the parallel port, there's only six
outputs going to the game card from the Cinematronics CPU card -- though the
PC software would have to be fast enough to act like a shift register in
some cases.

For a diskless system you can buy EPROM boards that allow you to have your
PC boot into an EPROM program on power up (No harddisk, no floppies, no
video, no keyboard). I've written drivers to do this that I would donate to
the cause if anybody were really interested. (I wrote the driver that
SEA-LEVEL EPROM cards currently recommend, from Annabooks/Annasoft)

-Zonn

At 12:03 PM 6/25/97 -0800, you wrote:
>Hey everyone,
>
>So. I was thinking... (That should be enough to send everyone running for
>cover... ;-)
>
>This Star Trek/Space Fury/Etc. Speech board has been bothering me since
>those SPO-250 speech chips seem impossible to find. Have any of you tried
>playing with the ISD (Information Storage Devices) Single Chip Voice
>record/playback chips?
>
>The ISD2500 series offers 8KHz sampling with 60 seconds of voice storage.
>"Messages" are addessable under MCU control. Price in singles is about
>$14, which drops to $12 in 10's.
>
>They store sound as roughly 8-bit samples in an EEPROM array, so sound
>quality *should* be pretty good-- and they include antialiasing and
>smoothing filters. The downside is that they need to be "loaded" with the
>samples from an analog source. (Not a HUGE deal really.)
>
>My idea:
>
>Take one of these little 60 second devils and make a series of .WAV files
>that are played by a PC from the "original" sample boards. (Processing on
>the PC might even help improve the sound quality-- digital gain and
>equilization and whatnot.) Then, "load" the ISD chip with the samples from
>a little Visual Basic program driving the .WAV files and a couple lines on
>the Parallel port to control the "play/record" lines on the ISD chip.
>(This would be for "automated" production, you could just as easily do it
>by hand to experiment with.)
>
>Then, just have a little processor that takes the "phrase" input from the
>G-80 system and selects the appropriate sample in the ISD and hits "play".
>The processor (I suppose a PIC 16C54 would work. Had to get my PIC plug
>in. :-) could also take 2-3 "game select" lines to use for "bank select"
>which samples to play. (so 00 is Star Trek, 01 is Space Fury, etc...)
>
>I suppose if someone is doing an all-in-one DSP sound card that the samples
>aren't a problem, but this looked kinda cool from the "easy to put
>together" standpoint. (Probably 2 chips?)
>
>Comments?
>
>-Clay
>
>Clayton N. Cowgill Engineering Manager
>_______________________________________________________________________
>/\ Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc. clay@supra.com
>\/ Communications Division http://www.supra.com/
>
>
>
>
Received on Wed Jun 25 13:36:21 1997